In the contemporary landscape about temporal experience, debates concerning the “hard question” of the experience of the flow—as opposed to debates concerning more qualitative aspects of temporality, such as change, movement, succession and duration—are gaining more and more attention. The overall dialectics can be thought of in terms of a debate between the realists (who take the phenomenology of the flow of time seriously, and propose various account of it) and deflationists (who take our description of temporal phenomenology as “flowy” (...) to be spurious, and propose various explanation of this spuriousness). In this paper we look inside the realist side. We distinguish primitivist realism, according to which the feeling of time flowing is an irreducible sui generis phenomenology, and various forms of reductionist realism, according to which the experience of the flow is ultimately explainable in terms of a more basic phenomenology. We present reasons to be sceptical against the various reductionist proposals. The conclusion is thus disjunctive: either primitivism or deflationism is the correct account of the purported experience of the flow of time. (shrink)

This paper explores mutable futurism, the view according to which the future can literally change—that is, it can happen that a future time t changes from containing an event E to lacking it. Mutable futurism has received little attention so far, and the details and implications of the view are underexplored in the literature. For instance, it currently lacks a precise metaphysical model and a formal semantics. Although we do not endorse mutable futurism, our goal here is to strengthen the (...) case for mutable futurism and help establish it as a worthy contender in the debate on the philosophy of time. To attain this goal, we try to make mutable futurism, along with its metaphysical and inferential commitments, as clear as possible, by providing it with a coherent metaphysical model and a plausible semantics, and we show that it can be backed by theoretical reasons. (shrink)

This paper defends Priorianism, a theory in the philosophy of time which combines three theses: first, that there is a metaphysical distinction between the present time and non-present times; second, that there are temporary propositions, that is, propositions that change in truth-value simpliciter over time; and third, that there is change over time only if there are temporary propositions. Priorianism is accepted by many Presentists, Growing Block Theorists, and Moving Spotlight Theorists. However, it is difficult to defend the view without (...) appealing to premises that those who reject the view find controversial. My aim in this paper is to defend Priorianism in a way that largely avoids appealing to such premises. I do three things: first (Section 1), I describe the component theses of Priorianism and the relations between them. Next (Section 2), I show how Priorians can respond to the argument that the B-theory implies that there are temporary propositions, and therefore satisfies the Priorian condition for there being change over time. Finally (Section 3), I defend the Priorian thesis that there is change over time only if there are temporary propositions against an alternative principle of change defended by Ross Cameron (The Moving Spotlight, 2015). (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)