Questions on Time and Tense 0198236956, 0199250464

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QUESTIONS OF TIME AND TENSE edited bv

ROBIN LE POIDEVIN

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6oP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research. scholarship. and education by publishing ·worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Tott•n Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sao Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and an associated company in Berlin Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States By Oxford University Press Inc., Nev.· York

© the several contributors 1998

First published 1998 First published in paperback 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced. stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted. in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford Uniwrsity Press, or as expressly permitted hy law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Departmem. OJ..ford University Press. at the address above

Leaming R2sburces Centre

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You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data ,. Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Dara Questions of time and tense I edited by Robin Le Poidevin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Time. I. Le Poide,·in. Robin. 1962BD638.Q47 1998 II5-dc21 98-28486 ISBN 0-19-823695-6 (hbk) ISBN 0-19-925046-4 (pbk) I

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Typeset by Graphicraft Ltd, Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd, Midsomer Norton, Somerset

In memory of Murray MacBeath� 1946-1995

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PREFACE one exception. all the papers appearing here were written for this volume. The exception is Jeremy Butterfield's ·seeing the Present', which fitted in so well with the theme of the collection that it seemed entirely appropriate to include it. It is very sad to record that. during the preparation of Questions of Time and Tense, Murray MacBeath. who was going to contribute, died at the age of 48. His original and lively writings on time have done much to make the subject accessible. This collection is dedicated to his memory.

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CONTENTS Notes on the Comributors

XI

Introduction I.

The Past. Present. and Future of the Debate about Tense Robin Le Poide\·in

2.

Tense and Persistence E. J. Lowe

3. Seeing the Present Jeremy Butrerfie/d

43

61

4. Tense and Emotion David Cockburn

77

5. Real Times and Possible Worlds Heather Dvke

93

6. Time as Spacetime Graham Nerlich

119

7. Absolute Simultaneity and the Infinity of Time Quentin Smith

135

8. Freedom and the New Theory of Time L. Nathan Oaklander 9. Morality, the Unborn, and the Open Future Piers Benn 1 o.

The Tensed vs. Tenseless Theory of Time: A Watershed for the Conception of Divine Eternity William Lane Craig

207

221

Contents

X

I I.

Time and Trinity Paul Helm

1 2.

Tense and Egocentricity in Fiction Gregory Currie

Bibliography Index of Names

251

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS PIERS BENN is Lecturer in Medical Ethics at Imperial College. London. He is the author of Ethics ( 1997) and articles on nom1ative ethics. JEREMY BUTTERFIELD is Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the editor of Language, Mind and Logic ( I 986) and (with others) of Spacetinu' ( 1996). He has published numerous articles on the philosophy of quantum mechanics. DA v ID C oc KB L.J RN is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wales, Lampeter. He is the author of Other Human Beings ( 1990) and Other Times: Philosophical Perspect1\·es 011 Past. Presellf and Future ( 1997), and editor of Human Beings ( I 99 I). He is currently working on the problem of causation. WILLIAM LANE CRAIG is Research Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology. He is the author of The Ka/am Cosmological Argument (1979) and Dil·im1 Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (1992), and, with Quentin Smith. Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology (1993). He is currently completing a two-volume study of divine eternity entitled God, Time and Eternity . GREGORY CURRIE is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of An Ontology of Art (1989), The Nature of Fiction (1990), Image and Mind: Film, Philo­ sophy and Cognitive Science (1995), and of articles in Mind, American Philoso­ phical Quarterly, and other philosophical journals. He is currently working on a theory of the imagination. HEATHER DYKE is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Otago. She took her Ph.D. at the University of Leeds. Her dissertation was a defence of the token-reflexive version of the new tenseless theory of time. PA u L HELM is Emeritus Professor of the History and Philosophy of Religion at King's College London. He is the author of Eternal God (1988), The Providence of God ( I 993), and Belief Policies ( I 994). His research inter­ ests include all aspects of the philosophy of religion, and the history of Calvinism. ROBIN LE PoIDEVIN is Professor of Metaphysics at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Change, Cause and Contradiction (1991) and Arguing

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Notes on the Contributors

for Atheism (1996), and co-editor, with Murray MacBeath, of The Philosophy of Time (1993). At present he is writing on temporal representation. E. J. LowE is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Durham. He is the author of Kinds of Being: A Study of Individuation, Identity and the Logic of Sorta/ Terms (1989), Locke on Human Understanding (1995), and Subjects of Experience (1996). He is currently working on a book entitled Substance, Identity and Time. GRAHAM NERLICH is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide. He is the author of The Shape of Space (1976, 2nd edition 1994), Values and Valuing (1989), and What Spacetime Explains (1994). He is currently working on the question of how the emotions might bear on the foundations of value. L. NATHAN OAKLANDER is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan-Flint. His main publications are Temporal Relations and Temporal Becoming (1984), The New Theory of Time (co-edited with Quentin Smith, 1994), and Existentialist Philosophy: An Introduction (1996). At present he is working on a book on time, freedom, and the self. QUENTIN SMITH is Professor of Philosophy at Western Michigan Univer­ sity. He is the author of The Felt Meanings of the World (1986), Language and Time (1993), Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology (co-authored with William Lane Craig, 1993), Time, Change and Freedom (co-authored with L. Nathan Oaklander, 1995), and The Question of Ethical and Religious Meanings (1997). He is currently completing The Uncreated Universe, co­ authored with Adolf Grtinbaum.

Introduction One of the central and most rapidly developing debates in contemporary metaphysics concerns the status of our ordinary division of time into past, present, and future. On one side of the debate stand the tensed theorists, who take seriously our intuitive conception of time, expressed metaphorically (or perhaps not -so metaphorically) by the picture of time •flowing'. On the other side stand the tense/ess theorists. who deny the reality of temporal passage, and take our intuitive conception simply to reflect our perspective on time rather than the nature of time itself. In recent years. the debate has centred around two issues: I. What, in reality. makes true our various tensed judgements? 2. Are future events as real as present events? Let us look at these in order. Examples of tensed judgements are: 'The party will take place tomorrow,· 'The war was a very long time ago,' 'It is now snowing in Aberdeen.' According to the tensed theory, what makes these judge­ ments true are tensed facts, the fact, for example, that snowing in Aberdeen is, in some non-perspectival sense, present. This is a transient property of events, so that what is now future will become past with the passage of time. The truth-makers of tensed judgements, then, according to this theory, obtain at some times but not others. The tenseless theory, in contrast, rejects the existence of tensed facts. and explains the truth of tensed judgements in terms of unchanging temporal facts. On one version of the tenseless theory, a token present-tensed judgement, 'It is now snowing in Aberdeen,' is true if and only if the token is simultaneous with the event it describes. If such truth­ conditions obtain, they obtain for all times , so tensed tokens have a time­ invariant truth-value. Turning to the second question, the issue is sometimes put as follows: are present statements about the future determinately true or false? Defenders of the unreality of the future may assert one of the following: (i) statements about the future have no truth-value, since there are no future facts to make them true or false; or (ii) statements about the future only have truth-value to the extent that present states of affairs determine the future. How does the tensed/tenseless debate as characterized above map onto the one about

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Introduction

the reality of the future? The tenseless stance is quite clear: all times are equally real, so there are truth-makers for future-tense statements which consequently have determinate truth-values. The tensed stance is not so obvious. On the face of it, it would be possible to take a tensed view of the truth -conditions of tensed judgements while asserting the equal reality of all times. However, the plausibility of the view that the future is unreal or indeterminate, and its apparent links with our freedom of action. makes it a popular argument in favour of the tensed theory. It has also been argued that tensed theory is actually committed to the unreality. not just of the future, but of the past also. Much has been written on these two questions, and in defence of the tensed or tenseless theories, over the last twenty years. More recently. the debate has intensified as a result of new formulations both of the tensed theory and of the tenseless theory. My characterization of the debates above would no longer be regarded as uncontentious. 1 Some tensed theorists, for example, would object to my saddling them with the idea that presentness is a prop­ erty of events. But, whatever the details of formulation, the outcome of the debate is highly significant, as questions of time are intimately connected with debates in other areas of philosophy. The purpose of this volume is to make explicit those connections, to show how the debate between the two theories of time can illuminate other issues in metaphysics. philosophy of mind, philo­ sophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion. ethics, and aesthetics, and, conversely, to show how debates in other areas of philosophy have a bearing on the debate about tense. In this Introduction I shall briefly sketch these connections, leaving a more detailed study of the development of the two theories for the first•essay. For convenience. I shall group the points of contact between time and other problems under seven headings. I. Diach ronic iden tity A central issue in metaphysics concerns the persistence. or identity through time, of objects. A long-standing philosophical tradition has attached signi­ ficance to the commonsense distinction between terms such as ·statue' or 'chair ' , on the one hand, and 'concert' or 'war ' on the other. According to this tradi­ tion the first kind of term is used to name continuants. whereas the second kind is used to name events or processes. The supposed difference is that 1 The tensed and tenseless theories have a number of variants. On one version of the tensed theory (described as the 'tensed date theory' in Ch. I of this volume), the truth-value of a tensed token does not vary over time. Most tensed theorists treat presentness as non-relational . An exception is Tooley ( 1 997). His pos ition is summarized in Ch. 1 below.

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