Temporal Becoming and the A- and B- Theories of Time :: Philosophy Philosophical Time Papers

Temporal proper and the A- and B- Theories of Time It is interesting to note that many of Saint Augustines concerns round cadence around 400AD are the same as we have today. For example, Augustine was puzzled about the nature of the distinction between the past, the present and the succeeding(a). He was also pertain about the nature and status of the apparent flow of time. In this shew we will consider a much more recent accession to time that came to the fore in the twentieth century. In 1908 James McTaggart promulgated an article in Mind entitled The Unreality of Time, in which, as the title implies, he argued that there is in reality no such thing as time. Now although this claim was in itself startling, probably what was pull down more significant than McTaggarts arguments was his way of stating them. It was in this paper that McTaggart first displace his now hold waterard distinction between two ways of locution when things happen. In this essay we shall outline thes e ways of describing events and then hold forth the merits and demerits of each, and meet what has become known as the tensed versus tenseless debate on temporal becoming. ane way which we speak, experience and conceive of time is that time is something that flows or passes from the future to the present and from the present to the past. When viewed in this way, events which are present have a special existential status. Whatever may be the case with get word to the reality or unreality of events in the future and the past, events that are in the present exist with a capital E. It can then be postulated that it is the present or now that shifts to even later times. If events in time (or moments of time) are conceived in terms of past, present and future, or by means of the tenses, then they act what McTaggart called the A-series (from which the A-theory of time is derived). This type of change is commonly referred to as temporal becoming, and gives rise to swell up known perpl exities concerning both what does the shifting and the type of shift involved, which we will discuss later. On the former(a) hand, we experience events in time as occurring in succession, one after another, and as simultaneous with other events. When viewed in this way, events stand in various different temporal relations to each other but no one event, or set of events, is singled out as having the property of being present or as occurring now.