Presentism, Eternalism, and the Growing Block

Abstract

Presentism, eternalism, and growing-blockism are theories or models of what the temporal and ontic structure of the world is, or could be. i shall set aside the question of whether whichever theory is true is necessarily true or only contingently true. since defenders of each of these views at the very least think that they are competing views about the way our world is in fact, i focus discussion on this aspect of the dialectic.Presentism, eternalism, and growing-blockism are, in part, theories about what exists. "Exists" is used in ordinary English in a number of ways. To understand what is at issue between these three views we need to understand what each view intends when it makes claims about what exists. suppose i stand in my kitchen and utter the following three claims:A. There is no santa Claus. B. There is no beer. C. There are no dinosaurs.When i utter (B) in my kitchen, what i say is true. That is because it is natural to understand me as claiming that there is no beer in my kitchen. since there is beer at the local shop, the claim that there is no beer at all anywhere is false. That is, the claim "there is no beer" is false if we do not relativize the claim to some particular domain, like my kitchen, in which there is no beer.When i utter (A) this is also true. 1 But a natural reading of my utterance of (A) in my kitchen is not that that there is no santa Claus in my kitchen, though that is true, but that there is no santa Claus anywhere: no santa simpliciter, as we put it. The difference between (A) and (B) is that a natural reading of (B) tacitly restricts the domain 21 A Companion to the Philosophy of Time, First Edition. Edited by Heather Dyke and Adrian Bardon.

The Rights of Future Persons and the Ontology of Time

“…6 See, for example, Sider (2001), Michael C. Rea (2003), Lawrence Sklar (1985), Ferrell Christensen (1981), and Putnam (1967). 7 See Kristie Miller (2013), Ned Markosian (2004), and Ned Markosian, Meghan Sullivan, and Nina Emery (2014) for overviews of the debates. 8 Hence, I would not be arguing here that presentists and growing block theorists cannot account for the rights of future persons.…”

“… See Kristie Miller (), Ned Markosian (), and Ned Markosian, Meghan Sullivan, and Nina Emery () for overviews of the debates.…”

Journeying to the past: time travel and mental time travel, how far apart?

“…In a block-universe, all past, present, and future events coexist within a four-dimensional manifold of space–time. Although these events are organized by unchanging relationships, such as being earlier than, later than, or simultaneous with each other, all points in time hold equal ontological status ( Miller, 2013 ). The block-universe theory supposes an eternalist conception of time.…”

On Metaphysical Explanations of Psychological Asymmetries

“…Do we have special metaphysical organs that allow us to detect a change in fundamental tensed facts or in what exists? As has recently been pointed out, these two objections are related, because the kinds of modifications that make an A-theory more acceptable in the light of objections from physics tend also to make it less able to explain temporal phenomenology ( (Callender, 2017), (Miller, 2013), (Dieks, 2016)).…”