Science fiction is often held up as a particularly philosophical genre. For, beyond actualising mind-experiment-like fantasies, science fiction films also commonly toy with speculative ideas, or else engineer encounters with the strange and unknown. Denis Villeneuve's Arrival is a contemporary science fiction film that does exactly this, by introducing Lovecraft-esque tentacular aliens whose arrival on Earth heralds in a novel, but ultimately paralysing, inhuman perspective on the nature of time and reality. This article shows how this cerebral film invites (...) viewers to confront a counterintuitive model of time that at once recalls and reposes what Gilles Deleuze called a “third synthesis” of time, and that which J. M. E. McTaggart named the a-temporal “C series” of “unreal” time. We finally suggest that Arrival's a-temporal conception of the future as having already happened can function as a key to understanding the fate of humanity as a whole as we pass from the anthropocene, in which humans have... (shrink)

Is time flowing? A-theorists say yes, B-theorists say no. But both take time to be real. It means that B-theorists accept that time might be real, even if lacking a property usually ascribed to it. In this paper, I want to ask what are the different properties usually ascribed to time in order to draw the list of different possible kinds of realism and anti-realism about time. As we will see, there are three main kinds (...) of anti-realism. I will claim that if time is defined as the universe’s fourth dimension, there is no way time could be unreal. (shrink)

This text is a translation of an article by British idealist J.E. McTaggart “The Unreality of Time” published in the journal Mind in 1908. Author argues for the unreality of time by employing his typical methods – rejection of reality of contradictory objects, difference between real and existent, etc. This paper became a standard of excellence of McTaggart analytical style and is a classic example of British absolute idealism. The translation was made by Andrey A. Veretennikov.

The purpose of this paper is to explore certain problems about the idea of time which lead to the conclusion that the concept is really contradictory. If this is so, then the idealists were correct in making the paradoxical claim that time is unreal. Following McTaggart the phrase “A-temporal determinations” will refer to the temporal “properties” of being past, present, or future, and “B-determinations” to the temporal relations of being before, after, or between.

This book recognizes and questions a key assumption about time which is shared by common sense and philosophy—the assumption that time, like a single substance or a homogeneous quality, is subject to the law of contradiction. This leads to the logical conclusion that among different and mutually exclusive accounts of time, whether in science, practical action, or fine art, only one can be the “right” one. Four such accounts are shown here to be internally consistent though mutually (...) incompatible, suggesting that the initial assumption is mistaken, and that in some way each alternative concept of time must be incomplete. Brumbaugh suggests that we must choose the one appropriate to a particular purpose: artistic creation, technological efficiency, discovery of mathematical laws of nature, or work with biological and social phenomena. The selection should allow coherence between that aspect of reality which the selected time concept emphasizes, and the aspect of reality most relevant to a successful execution of our purpose. (shrink)

McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time is generally believed to be a self-contained argument independent of McTaggart's idealist ontology. I argue that this is mistaken. It is really a demonstration of a contradiction in the appearance of time, on the basis of certain a priori ontological axioms, in particular the thesis that all times exist in parity. When understood in this way, the argument is neither obscure or unfounded, but arguably does not address those versions of the (...) A-theory that deny that all times exist in parity. (shrink)

T. L. S. Sprigge; I *—The Presidential Address: The Unreality of Time, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 June 1992, Pages 1–20, htt.

McTaggart, in his famous paper, “The Unreality of Time” (1908), argues in favor of the sceptical claim that time is unreal. His main argument is based on detecting a paradox in our ordinary descriptions of time or events occurring in time. Based on our common sense conception of time, time and the events happening in it can be described in two ways: either as having the properties of “being past”, “being present” and “being (...) future”, or as having the properties of “being earlier than”, “being later than”, or “being simultaneous with”. McTaggart argues that employing the second sort of properties fails to properly explain “change” in time. However, having assumed the essentiality of the first type of properties to time, McTaggart argues that these properties will themselves lead to a paradox, according to which all events are at the same time in the past, present, and future. In this essay, we are going to provide a clear exposition of McTaggart’s argument and briefly review some of the main responses to it. We will then show that McTaggart’s argument will amount to error-theory about the content of our utterances about time. We will then employ Boghossian’s argument against error-theory (1990) to show why McTaggart’s argument leads to paradoxical conclusions. (shrink)

Years ago, Michael Dummett defended McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time, arguing that it cannot be dismissed as guilty of an “indexical fallacy.” Recently, E. J. Lowe has disputed Dummett’s claims for the cogency of the argument. I offer an elaboration and defense of Dummett’s interpretation of the argument (though not of its soundness). I bring to bear some work on tense from the philosophy of language, and some recent work on the concept of the past as it (...) occurs in memory, in an effort to support the claim that McTaggart is not guilty of any simple indexical fallacy. Along the way I criticize an account of what is at stake in disputes about the reality of tense due to A. W. Moore, and I argue for the superiority of the conception of tense-realism that is implicit in McTaggart’s work. The paper is intended to prepare the ground for a substantive defense of the reality of tense. (shrink)

T. L. S. Sprigge; I *—The Presidential Address: The Unreality of Time, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 June 1992, Pages 1–20, htt.

What should be immediately apparent to any writer of realistic fiction is its unreal or synthetic nature. Regardless of how persuasive the forgery appears, it is still a forgery. The colors of the painting are not identical to those of the real world. The illusion of similarity is achieved by trickery. The houses of realistic novels are like those found on a stage set; they are there to lend reality and weight to what is important, which may be a (...) conversation between two realistically dressed people, walking in front of the novels' realistic buildings, conversing about something which would, in actuality, be impossible to talk about openly, something which would, ordinarily, seem impossible to take seriously as a motive for violent emotion which leads to violent action. No matter how expertly and exactly a novelist's world duplicates common reality, the duplication must be a means to an end. Duplication itself is not the novel's goal. If it were, the novelist would be properly defined as a camera which takes pictures with words or as a maker of verbal documentaries who strives to capture the passing scene. This is an axiom which must appear self-evident to both the writer and the audience. However, when I wrote Anya , I found that this self-evident truth provided random and unreliable light; if this truth had been a source of electricity, it would be safe to say that its failure to illuminate caused a blackout of comprehension for many critics and readers. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, is the author of Falling, Anya, and Time in Its Flight, several collections of poetry, including Rhymes and Runes of the Toad and Alphabet for the Lost Years, and, most recently, The Queen of Egypt and Other Stories. (shrink)

Digital technologies create and shape our environments, the infosphere, where we spend increasingly more time. Through exploration of such concepts as "latency", "real time" and "unreal time", this article discusses how time has changed due to the digital revolution over the past half-century.

Michael Tooley presents a major new philosophical theory of the nature of time, offering a powerful alternative to the traditional "tensed" and recent "tenseless" accounts of time. He argues for a dynamic conception of the universe, in which past, present, and future are not merely subjective features of experience. He claims that the past and the present are real, while the future is not. Tooley's approach accounts for time in terms of causation. He therefore claims that the (...) key to understanding the dynamic nature of the universe is to understand the nature of causation. Time, Tense, and Causation is a landmark treatment of one of the oldest and most perplexing intellectual problems, and will be fascinating reading for anyone interested in the character of time. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to characterize the issue whether tense is real. Roughly, this is the issue whether, given any tensed representation, its tense corresponds in some suitably direct way to some feature of reality. The task is to make this less rough. Eight characterizations of the issue are considered and rejected, before one is endorsed. On this characterization, the unreality of tense is equivalent to the unity of temporal reality. The issue whether tense is real, so characterized, (...) is then related to Kant’s deduction of the categories in his Critique of Pure Reason. It is argued that Kant’s deduction does not provide the argument for the unreality of tense that it may appear to. The conclusion drawn at the end of the essay is that the unreality of tense cannot be argued for—not because tense is real, but because, even if it is unreal, its unreality is basic. (shrink)

This is a reprint of the classic work by Henry Churchill King, "The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life."At Oberlin College from 1884, he taught in mathematics, philosophy, and theology. From 1902 to 1927, he was president of the college. With a tenure of 25 years, is Oberlin's longest-serving president. In 1919, he served on the King-Crane Commission, whose recommendations on the fair and just disposition of non-Turkish areas of the Ottoman Empire might, had they been followed, would have averted (...) many of the tragedies that have come to pass in the Middle East since that time. The findings of that commission, suppressed until 1922, were finally made public in the King-Crane Commission Report and shed tremendous light on the wishes of the indigenous peoples of the region, as to who would be entrusted with the various mandates, the future of Palestine, and other vital issues.He was prominent in the councils of the Congregational Church and a moderator (1919-21) of its National Council as well as chairman (1921-27) of the Congregational Foundation for Education. (shrink)

These are just some of the fundamental questions addressed in Time and Space. Writing for a primary readership of advanced undergraduate and graduate philosophy students, Barry Dainton introduces the central ideas and arguments that make space and time such philosophically challenging topics. Although recognising that many issues in the philosophy of time and space involve technical features of physics, Dainton has been careful to keep the conceptual issues accessible to students with little scientific or mathematical training. Surveying (...) historical debates and ideas at the forefront of contemporary thinking, the book is unrivaled in its coverage. Topics include McTaggart's argument for the unreality of change; static, tensed, and dynamic time; time travel and causal arrows; space as void, motion, and curved spac; as well as a non-technical introduction to the special theory of relativity and the key features of general relativity, spacetime, and strings. Dainton also addresses the relationship between the philosophy of time and broader human concerns involving actions, ethics, fatalism, and death. (shrink)

Growing-Block theorists hold that past and present things are real, while future things do not yet exist. This generates a puzzle: how can Growing-Block theorists explain the fact that some sentences about the future appear to be true? Briggs and Forbes develop a modal ersatzist framework, on which the concrete actual world is associated with a branching-time structure of ersatz possible worlds. They then show how this branching structure might be used to determine the truth values of future contingents. (...) They point out three different ways of interpreting the logical connectives, which give rise to three different logics of the open future: one supervaluationist, one corresponding to Lukasiewicz's strong Kleene logic, and one intuitionist. (shrink)

This article presents a corpus linguistic analysis of the development in future-oriented political journalism in four Danish newspapers in the period 1997–2013. Keyword analysis and concordance analysis are applied within a framework of grammatical-semantic theory of tense and modal verbs and semantic-pragmatic theory of time meaning, modality and speech acts. The results suggest, unexpectedly, that the newspapers – and news reports in particular – seem to have become less future-oriented in the period. At the same time, however, the (...) articles – and particularly news commentary, in itself increasing – might have become slightly more speculative. Thus, the journalists themselves have become the main source of ‘guessing’, that is, predicting and speculating, with the keywords vil and ville, including unreal and counterfactual speculations in the past tenses. (shrink)

The main goal of Michael Tooley’s groundbreaking book is to establish a position intermediate between the tenseless theory of time and the standard tensed theory of time. Tooley argues for a novel version of the tensed theory of time, namely, that the future is unreal and the present and past real, and yet that reality consists only of tenseless facts. The question that naturally arises for the reader concerns an apparent paradox: how could the tensed theory (...) of time be true if reality consists only of tenseless facts? (shrink)

The experience of time and temporally extended events is a fundamental property of mind, and of time-based media arts. In dealing with properties of time, does the operational logic of contemporary media production tools cohere with philosophical views on the experience of time? This article considers a range of views on the phenomenal experience of time as they relate to the production of time-based media. Embedded within our production technologies, the artist is faced with (...) a new philosophical instrument: the production timeline. The timeline utility in most time-based media software (and non-digital precursors) adopts the cinematic model as its operating metaphor; a series of frames, assembled one after the other in sequence. But the timeline brings new temporal complications such as reversibility, hierarchy and modifiability. The timeline also contorts time into a spatialized dimension, represented as a linear vector within the software interface. Automatic adoption of the linear timeline and the frame as the base unit of temporal thinking is problematic. J. M. E. McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time based on contradictions within a range of possible temporal modal logics is compared with approaches to animation and editing software, and also interactive media software and their unique approach to time as potential events is considered. (shrink)

John Ellis McTaggart defended an idealistic view of time in the tradition of Hegel and Bradley. His famous paper makes two independent claims (McTaggart1908): First, time is a complex conception with two different logical roots. Second, time is unreal. To reject the second claim seems to commit to the first one, i.e., to a pluralistic account of time. We compare McTaggarts views to the most important concepts of time investigated in physics, neurobiology, and philosophical (...) phenomenology. They indicate that a unique, reductionist account of time is far from being plausible, even though too many conceptions of time may seem unsatisfactory from an ontological point of view. (shrink)

In what sense does time exist? Is it an objective feature of the external world? Or is its real nature dependent on the way man experiences it? Has modern science brought us closer to the answer to St. Augustine's exasperated outcry, 'What, then, is time?'? Ever since Aristotle, thinkers have been struggling with this most confounding and elusive of philosophical questions. How long does the present moment last? Can we make statements about the future that are clearly true (...) or clearly false? And if so, must we be fatalists? This volume presents twenty-three discussions of the problem of time. A section on classical and modern attempts at definition is followed by four groups of essays drawn largely from contemporary philosophy, each preface with an introduction by the editor. First, in a chapter entitled 'The Static versus the Dynamic Temporal', four philosophers advance solutions to McTaggart's famous proof of time's unreality. In the next two sections, the discussion turns to the meaning of the 'open future' and to the much-debated nature of 'human time'. Finally, modern science and philosophy tackle Zeno's celebrated paradoxes. The essays by Adolf Grnbaum, Nicholas Rescher, and William Barrett are published for the first time in this volume. (shrink)

In what sense does time exist? Is it an objective feature of the external world? Or is its real nature dependent on the way man experiences it? Has modern science brought us closer to the answer to St. Augustine's exasperated outcry, 'What, then, is time?' ? Ever since Aristotle, thinkers have been struggling with this most confounding and elusive of philosophical questions. How long does the present moment last? Can we make statements about the future that are clearly (...) true or clearly false? And if so, must we be fatalists? This volume presents twenty-three discussions of the problem of time. A section on classical and modern attempts at definition is followed by four groups of essays drawn largely from contemporary philosophy, each preface with an introduction by the editor. First, in a chapter entitled 'The Static versus the Dynamic Temporal', four philosophers advance solutions to McTaggart's famous proof of time's unreality. In the next two sections, the discussion turns to the meaning of the 'open future' and to the much-debated nature of 'human time'. Finally, modern science and philosophy tackle Zeno's celebrated paradoxes. The essays by Adolf Grnbaum, Nicholas Rescher, and William Barrett are published for the first time in this volume. (shrink)

E. J. Lowe sets out in a recent paper1 to refute McTaggart's proof of the unreality of time, by exposing an ‘indexical fallacy’ in his disproof of the existence of tensed (i. e., A-series) facts.2 Lowe then develops an original account of what makes time the dimension of change, based on his own account of tensed facts. But in our opinion he fails on both counts: (1) he fails to refute McTaggart's perfectly sound disproof of tensed facts, which (...) shows that time can be real only if (Lowe and McTaggart not withstanding) it needs no tensed facts, and (2) he fails to explain the temporal character of change, since his account of it has an exact spatial analogue. In what follows we argue these two points in turn. (shrink)

Photographs, paintings, rigid sculptures: all these provide examples of static images. It is true that they change—photographs fade, paintings darken and sculptures crumble—but what change they undergo is irrelevant to their representational content. A static image is one that represents by virtue of properties which remain largely unchanged throughout its existence. Because of this defining feature, according to a long tradition in aesthetics, a static image can only represent an instantaneous moment, or to be more exact the state of affairs (...) obtaining at that moment'. It cannot represent movement and the passage of time. This traditional view mirrors a much older one in metaphysics: that change is to be conceived of as a series of instantaneous states and hence that an interval of time is composed of extensionless moments. The metaphysical view has been involved in more controversy than its aesthetic counterpart. Aristotle identified it as one of the premises of Zeno's arrow paradox and Augustine employed it in his proof of the unreality of time. (shrink)

Photographs, paintings, rigid sculptures: all these provide examples of static images. It is true that they change—photographs fade, paintings darken and sculptures crumble—but what change they undergo is irrelevant to their representational content. A static image is one that represents by virtue of properties which remain largely unchanged throughout its existence. Because of this defining feature, according to a long tradition in aesthetics, a static image can only represent an instantaneous moment, or to be more exact the state of affairs (...) obtaining at that moment'. It cannot represent movement and the passage of time. This traditional view mirrors a much older one in metaphysics: that change is to be conceived of as a series of instantaneous states and hence that an interval of time is composed of extensionless moments. The metaphysical view has been involved in more controversy than its aesthetic counterpart. Aristotle identified it as one of the premises of Zeno's arrow paradox and Augustine employed it in his proof of the unreality of time. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to show how McTaggart's atemporal vision of reality is a serious attempt to describe a coherent world without time. It proposes that the answer to the puzzling nature of time is not to be found in the components of time itself, but in an atemporal reality that lies behind it. McTaggart takes an idealist view that reduces all that is real to spirit, that any expression of reality is dependent on a (...) manifestation of consciousness. McTaggart's argument that time is unreal, has been the subject of much philosophical debate since it first appeared in 1908; but much discussion has ignored McTaggart's positive account of time and concentrated on his negative proof. The author argues that the negative thesis should be separated from the positive account, he attacks the standard approaches to interpreting time and provides a full account of McTaggart's atemporal world. The conclusion is drawn that the timeless world has psychological appeal and can form the basis for an atemporal thinking which can break away from the confusing philosophical models of temporality that often bear little resemblance to our experience of it. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungTrakl konfrontiert ein materialistisches und ein idealistisches Wirklichkeitskonzept, um die Alltagsrealität als defizient zu kritisieren und auf poetische Weise eine geistige Gegenwirklichkeit orphischer Innerlichkeit zu gewinnen. Er benutzt dazu in Anlehnung an antike und christliche Vorbilder eine traditionelle Bildlichkeit, wonach der Tod als Schattenwelt, das Leben als Traum oder Theaterspiel erscheint, und eine in sich stimmige Symbolik. Zuletzt aber scheitert auch diese rein subjektive Sinnsuche der Erinnerung an bessere Zeiten an der unheilbaren Sinnlosigkeit der sozialen und kulturellen Gegenwart.Trakl confronts a (...) materialistic and an idealistic concept of reality in order to criticize everyday life as deficient and to poetically gain a spiritual counter-reality of orphic inwardness. He uses, based on antique and christian models, a traditional imagery, according to which death appears as a world of shadows, life as a dream or play, and a coherent symbolism. Ultimately, however, this purely subjective search for meaning through the memory of better times fails because of the incurable senselessness of the social and cultural present. (shrink)

Philosophical thinking about time is characterised by tensions between competing conceptions. Different sources of evidence yield different conclusions about it. Common sense suggests there is an objective present, and that time is dynamic. Science recognises neither feature. This Element examines McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time, which epitomises this tension, showing how it gave rise to the A-theory/B-theory debate. Each theory is in tension with either ordinary or scientific thinking, so must accommodate the competing conception. Reconciling (...) the A-theory with science does not look promising. Prospects look better for the B-theory's attempt to accommodate ordinary thinking about time. (shrink)

In Ennead III.7.11--13, Plotinus describes the genesis of time, and time's nature as the life of soul, and the moving image of eternity. In this dissertation, Ennead III.7.11--13 was read, using an exegetical method, which comprised, raising questions, and answering them, in strictly Plotinian terms, by contemplating the pieces that best fit into these puzzles. Some answers discovered were as follows. ;Before its appearance, time exists as the seed of time in Intellect. This is a state (...) of rest because of its relative unity, its participation in the genus rest, and its absence of tolma. Time's genesis comprises an eternal manifestation of a change of identity from seed to actualization. Time is generated in four logical steps. Soul becomes diluted upon its generative acts, mainly because of tolma. Soul has a far richer contemplation of Intellect underlying its genesis of the sensibles, than that underlying its genesis of time. ;Soul undergoes ontological loss in its generation of time and the sensible universe. Beginning with tolma, and the desires for autonomy unleashed by tolma, soul's multiplicity is enhanced. Yet this multiplicity is also tempered by soul's unquiet power's glance of aspiration towards Intellect. This glance is the contemplation, which fecundates soul's generation of time. Soul's power is its strength, but the unquietness of this power can indicate ontological loss. Tolma in soul incurs evil, because tolma thwarts soul from contemplating Intellect. ;The genus-species structure of soul is involved in the generation and omnipresence of time, through the actualization of the genus in its species. Time is ideally omnipresent when time is kairos. Soul is immortal and impassible, and it is only soul's activity and progeny, which are temporal. Time is the life of soul, insofar as movement is predicated of this life at three levels: the logical, the perceptible, and the spatial. Time itself is a poorer life than eternity, time itself is not alive, and yet, time is not unreal. Time is a moving image of eternity through the common predicates applied to both, which are their shared characteristics, defining the essence of the image that time constitutes. (shrink)

Over the last forty years, philosophers have argued back and forth about backward causation. It requires a certain structure of time for something as backward causation to be not only possible but also to take place in the real world. In case temporal becoming is an objective feature of the world in the sense that the future is unreal, or at least ontologically indeterminate, it is impossible to see how backward causation can arise. Th e same difficulty does (...) not hold with respect to forward causation. For even though it is assumed according to one dynamic view of time, the instant view or presentism, that merely present events exist—and past events therefore are no longer real or have become ontologically indeterminate—such a view can still maintain that past events once were there to cause present events. Future events, however, are still to come, and being indeterminate or nothing at all, they cannot cause any events in the present. In other words, causation backwards in time can occur only if we think of time as static; that is, no objective becoming exists, and the world consists of tenselessly occurring future events that exist in the same sense as past and present events. Backward causation requires the so-called full view, or possibly the half-full view, of time. (shrink)

This article (reprinted in Philosophy Now's 'The Ultimate Guide to Metaphysics' in 2018) introduces J.M.E. McTaggart's famous arguments for the 'unreality' of time, and their implications.

McTaggart argues that the A series, which orders events with reference to past, present, and future, involves an inescapable contradiction. The significant difference between the earlier version of his argument (Mind, 1908) and the version in The Nature of Existence, Volume II, Chapter 33 (1927), has often gone unnoticed. His arguments are all invalid; the conclusion can be rejected without rejecting any premiss. It is therefore unnecessary to adopt any philosophical thesis about time (e.g., that some token-reflexive analysis of (...) tensed statements is adequate) to avoid McTaggart's final conclusion that time is unreal. (shrink)

The three theories considered here, real continuous time, real serial time, and unreal time, are each in some sense a reaction to Hume’s theory of serial or “spatialized” time. Hence, Hume’s theory is elaborated on as a foundation for the discussion and comparison of the subsequent three. This brief excursion into the nature of time may help to illuminate the differences among these three and to suggest some of their possible implications, particularly with regard (...) to the existential difference between intuited or transcendent time and experienced or immanent time and the qualitative or ontological difference between the eternal and the temporal. (shrink)

Letter to the Editors in response to Alasdair Richmond's 'Time Travelers'.

I use Kant's theory of the transcendental ideality of time to answer McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time. McTaggart's argument is that the atemporal C-series (the logical atoms of all moments) must be regarded as the metaphysical foundation of the B-series, the non-dynamic world of objective temporal relations of events being earlier or later than others. That B-series (having a qualitative aspect that is not indifferent to the direction of time) is essentially an ossification of the (...) A-series--the dynamic flow of qualitative relations of past, present, and future moments. But McTaggart argues that the A-series is contradictory--if the A-series were real, then each logical moment of time would have past, present, and future equally predicated of it. Because it doesn't exist, then neither does the B-series. All that is real is atemporal C-series. Kant rejects this argument by denying the metaphysical reality of absolute time (the C-series). He then argues that the B-series is dependent on the A-series and that the A-series is subject-relative. The first person perspective creates the simple moment--the now--which acts as a temporal metric to metaphysically ground all possible B-series relations. This is how time (as the objective relations between events in nature) is transcendentally ideal. (shrink)