Abstract

There are two basic approaches to the question, "What is time?" One approach compares time to a flowing river, and emphasizes experiential features of time such as "the Now" and temporal becoming. The other compares time to a geometric line and emphasizes the physicist's static before-and-after order of infinitely many infinitesimal moments. I maintain that time is both like a river and like a line; both time's experiential features and its geometric features are real. Against philosophers of physics such as Grunbaum and Reichenbach I argue the becoming is not illusory or "merely psychological." Against experiential philosophers such as Bergson I argue that the static succession of point-like moments arranged in a before-and-after order is also real, even though it is not found in experience. Although the temporal features given in experience and those revealed by physics seem to conflict, I show that the seeming conflicts can be resolved when the proper distinctions are made. It is the "quality of experienced time" that is dynamic and discrete , while it is the locations of events that are arranged along a static order of infinitesimal moments. The theory I develop based on this idea reconciles what we experience as time with scientific notions of time