The Unique Groundability of Temporal Facts

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (1) (2017)
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Abstract

The A-theory and the B-theory advance competing claims about how time is grounded. The A-theory says that A-facts are more fundamental in grounding time than are B-facts, and the B-theory says the reverse. We argue that whichever theory is true of the actual world is also true of all possible worlds containing time. We do this by arguing that time is uniquely groundable: however time is actually grounded, it is necessarily grounded in that way. It follows that if either the A-theory or the B-theory is actually false, then it is necessarily false.

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Citations of this work

Explaining contingent facts.Fatema Amijee - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (4):1163-1181.
Arbitrary grounding.Jonas Werner - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (3):911-931.
Time, and time again.Sam Baron & Yi-Cheng Lin - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):259-282.

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References found in this work

On what grounds what.Jonathan Schaffer - 2009 - In David Manley, David J. Chalmers & Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford University Press. pp. 347-383.
The unreality of time.John Ellis McTaggart - 1908 - Mind 17 (68):457-474.
Epistemic Two-Dimensional Semantics.David J. Chalmers - 2004 - Philosophical Studies 118 (1-2):153-226.
The Indispensability of Mathematics.Mark Colyvan - 2001 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

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