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(2000) The tensed theory of time, Dordrecht, Springer.
"The main dispute in the philosophy of time," writes one recent combatant, "is about the status of the present."1 Is the present an objective, independent feature of reality or is it merely a subjective feature of consciousness or, at best, a purely relational feature of events? Is time characterized by objective tense determinations like pastness, presentness, and futurity, or are the moments of time ordered only by tenseless relations like earlier than, simultaneous with,and later than? Since J. M. E. McTaggart first distinguished clearly between these two kinds of time, labeling them the A- and B-series respectively, philosophers of time have found it useful to adopt McTaggart"s nomenclature, referring to theories of tensed time as A-Theories and theories of tenseless time as B-Theories. One of the most hotly contested issues in the struggle between A-theorists and B-theorists concerns the alleged ineliminability of tense from language or thought and the implications which this has for the nature of time. Accordingly in this section we shall consider what implications linguistic tense has for an adequate ontology of time.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-9345-8_1
Full citation:
Craig, W.L. (2000). Introduction: language, tense, and ontology, in The tensed theory of time, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 3-22.
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