Over the last forty years, philosophers have argued back and forth about backward causation. It requires a certain structure of time for something as backward causation to be not only possible but also to take place in the real world. In case temporal becoming is an objective feature of the world in the sense that the future is unreal, or at least ontologically indeterminate, it is impossible to see how backward causation can arise. Th e same difficulty does not hold (...) with respect to forward causation. For even though it is assumed according to one dynamic view of time, the instant view or presentism, that merely present events exist—and past events therefore are no longer real or have become ontologically indeterminate—such a view can still maintain that past events once were there to cause present events. Future events, however, are still to come, and being indeterminate or nothing at all, they cannot cause any events in the present. In other words, causation backwards in time can occur only if we think of time as static; that is, no objective becoming exists, and the world consists of tenselessly occurring future events that exist in the same sense as past and present events. Backward causation requires the so-called full view, or possibly the half-full view, of time. (shrink)

Since the onset of logical positivism, the general wisdom of the philosophy of science has it that the kantian philosophy of (space and) time has been superseded by the theory of relativity, in the same sense in which the latter has replaced Newton’s theory of absolute space and time. On the wake of Cassirer and Gödel, in this paper I raise doubts on this commonplace by suggesting some conditions that are necessary to defend the ideality of time in the sense (...) of Kant. In the last part of the paper I bring to bear some contemporary physical theories on such conditions. (shrink)

After stressing how the attempt to provide a plausible account of the connection between language and the world was one of Putnam’s constant preoccupations, this article describes the four stages his thinking about the concepts of truth and reality went through. Particular attention is paid to the kinds of problems that made him abandon each stage to enter the next. The analysis highlights how all the stages but one express a general non-epistemic stance towards truth and reality—the right stance, according (...) to Putnam, in order to develop full-blooded realism. Since the last stage combines a version of direct realism with a pluralist conception of truth, the article proceeds by focusing on Putnam’s alethic pluralism, carefully distinguishing it from alethic deflationism. Finally a suggestion is made as to where Putnam’s alethic pluralism may be placed within the constellation of current pluralist positions about truth. (shrink)

1.: In this paper I discuss Putnam’s view on time and the special theory of relativity. I first locate Putnam’s philosophical approach within a more general framework, essentially making reference to Sellar’s distinction between the scientific image and the manifest image of the world. I then reconstruct Putnam’s argument in favour of the reality of the future and the determinateness of truth-value for future tense sentences by showing that it is based on three premises that generate a contradiction. In the (...) second part of the paper I discuss Putnam’s argument both by using later results belonging to the foundations of STR and quantum mechanics, and by invoking some conceptual analysis on the pseudo-predicate “is real”. Since I will show that the presentists/eternalists debate is ill-founded if regarded as ontological, I will conclude that it boils down to our different practical attitudes towards past, present and future. (shrink)