Abstract

How are causality and time related? Of the two broadly "reductive" answers , causal theories of time remain the least attractive to contemporary philosophers. While favored analyses of causality in spatiotemporal terms boast deep and well-articulated motivations in empiricism, no similarly deep and unifying theme emerges from the scattered statements of causal theories of time. ;As a first step toward arguing that received wisdom has been too hasty in its judgments against causal theories of time, I reconstruct a Leibnizian account of the relation between causality and time. The reductive elements of this account--motivated by neither scientific, semantic, nor epistemological concerns--emerge from a careful look at the Leibnizian project as a distinctively metaphysical one: there is no time strictly speaking, according to Leibniz; there are truths expressing temporal relations between events, and these supervene on causal relations. With eliminative and supervenience reductions in hand, critics of a causal theory of time are invited to reassess its chances for success when regarded as a metaphysical theory