Appeals to the ‘common sense’, or ‘naïve’, or ‘folk’ concept of time, and the purported phenomenology as of time passing, play a substantial role in philosophical theorising about time. When making these appeals, philosophers have been content to draw upon their own assumptions about how non-philosophers think about time. This paper reviews a series of recent experiments bringing these assumptions into question. The results suggest that the way non-philosophers think about time is far less metaphysically demanding than philosophers have assumed.

An advantage of a typical growing block theory (GBT) or moving spotlight theory (MST) is that it can easily account for tenseless or tensed truths involving past entities. The paper indicates what is required for such an advantage is that a particular like a rock doesn’t change its status of being a rock when turning past from being present. But a typical GBT or MST, which implies that a particular’s turning past from being present doesn’t make a physical difference, faces (...) a series of problems. The paper then regards the exclusion of the implication of making no physical difference by a typical GBT or MST as the second requirement for being a tenable GBT or MST. It’s difficult to satisfy both requirements – even Miller’s (2019) MWT fails to do so. The paper shall reveal how a GBT can satisfy both requirements. (shrink)

This paper brings together the Sarvāstivāda (a major school of Abhidharma Buddhism) and Miller's (2019) moving spotlight theory to see how presentness is explained in terms of causation. The paper argues that a causal theory of presentness like Miller's encounters a dilemma: causation is either synchronic or diachronic, but neither is safe in the presence of the challenges. On the one hand, if causation is synchronic, how does a causal chain extend over time so that the wave of causation (and (...) hence the spotlight) can move at all? On the other, if causation is diachronic, then a present moment has a temporal extension enough to accommodate a cause and its proximate effect. The paper proposes a synchronic notion of causation that counters the first challenge. This can be done by bringing together the Sarvāstivādin grasp‐production model of causation, some Stoic ideas about causation, and some Armstrong's metaphysics. (shrink)