What makes time different from space?

Noûs 41 (2):227–252 (2007)
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Abstract

No one denies that time and space are different; and it is easy to catalog differences between them. I can point my finger toward the west, but I can’t point my finger toward the future. If I choose, I can now move to the left, but I cannot now choose to move toward the past. And (as D. C. Williams points out) for many of us, our attitudes toward time differ from our attitudes toward space. We want to maximize our temporal extent and minimize our spatial extent: we want to live as long as possible but we want to be thin.1 But these differences are not very deep, and don’t get at the essence of the difference between time and space. That’s what I want to understand: I want to know what makes time different from space. I want to know which difference is the fundamental difference between them.

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Bradford Skow
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Citations of this work

What’s So Spatial about Time Anyway?Sam Baron & Peter W. Evans - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (1):159-183.
Prospects for a new account of time reversal.Daniel J. Peterson - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 49:42-56.
Eternalist Tensism.Michael Nelson - 2015 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (6):590-605.

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References found in this work

The direction of time.Hans Reichenbach - 1956 - Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications. Edited by Maria Reichenbach.
On the Plurality of Worlds.David Lewis - 1986 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 178 (3):388-390.
Causation.David Lewis - 1973 - Journal of Philosophy 70 (17):556-567.
Four Dimensionalism.Theodore Sider - 1997 - Philosophical Review 106 (2):197-231.

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