Abstract

Tenseless time is the series of all moments and events ordered by the relationships before and after. According to this conception, although there is a time order, there is no present and therefore no past nor future. It is what McTaggart called the B-series. For most philosophers, tenseless time is more basic, objective and consistent with science than the tensed time used in our everyday language. However, that conception of time is the subject of several criticisms. One of them states that, given that it admits the existence of events that now we call future, the tenseless time has unavoidable fatalist consequences; because if it is already true today that tomorrow a certain event will occur, we now can in fact do nothing to avoid it. This paper analyses the specific sense of tenseless existence and tenseless truth and concludes that, if we properly understand these concepts, there is no reason to attribute fatalist connotations to tenseless time, and that the aforementioned criticism is based on the mistake of introducing in this conception of time some tensed notions of existence and truth, which are alien to it.