Abstract
Time appears to us to pass. Some philosophers think that we should account for these experiences by appeal to change in what there unrestrictedly is (i.e. ontological change). I argue that such an appeal can only be the beginning of an account of passage. To show this, I consider a minimal type of view—a purely topological view—that attempts to account for experiences as of passage by an appeal to ontological change and topological features of the present. I argue that, if ontological change is needed to account for our experiences as of passage, then there are other features of our experiences as of passage that a purely topological view does not have the resources to explain. These features include the implacability of time’s passage, the orderliness of time’s passage, and the impossibility of a having a past that was never present.
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Notes
I shall be restricting my attention to views which set things up in terms of change in what there is, where ‘what there is’ is neutral, and unrestricted, with respect to whether the event in question is present. Some views that might like the epithet ‘dynamic’ do not require ontological change, but change in what is predicated. Since I’m considering the role of topological features here, discussion of such views is beyond the scope of this paper.
Ersatz times might be made out of maximally consistent sets of propositions ordered to create sequences, for example.
See footnote 5, above.
Or rather, the earth’s spinning will slow despite my interventions. See http://what-if.xkcd.com/26/.
Ignoring the fact that one cannot provide an account for anything without time in which to do so.
I phrase it in this way to forestall the objection that I am raising a question that the semantics doesn’t allow, discussed in Sect. 5.
There may be some exceptions to this general rule. Such exceptions will be very unusual, however, so even if we allow such cases, the difference between those cases and the case where we must first train in order to have trained becomes even more striking.
This is a purely topological version of Craig Bourne (2006) Ersatzer Presentism.
Cf. Russell (1921).
Cf. Briggs and Forbes (2012).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to audiences at Southwestern College Kansas, Exeter, Sheffield and Kent for their feedback on presentations of this paper, and thanks also to Eric Olson, Stephen Wright, and Melissa Ebbers for incredibly useful comments and advice on drafts of this paper.
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Forbes, G.A. Accounting for Experiences as of Passage: Why Topology Isn’t Enough. Topoi 34, 187–194 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9254-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-014-9254-7