This book is the one to put into the hands of those who have been over-impressed by Austin 's critics....[Warnock's] brilliant editing puts everybody who is concerned with philosophical problems in his debt.

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under 'things in the broadest possible sense' I include such radically different items as not only 'cabbages and kings', but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to 'know one's way around' with respect (...) to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, 'how do I walk?', but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred. (shrink)

The distinction between presentism and eternalism is usually sought in some formula like ‘Only presently existing things exist’ or ‘Past, present, and future events are equally real’. I argue that ambiguities in the copula prevent these slogans from distinguishing significant opposed positions. I suggest in addition that one can find a series of significant distinctions if one takes spacetime structure into account. These presentisms and eternalisms are not contradictory. They are complementary elements of a complete naturalistic philosophy of time.

It has been repeatedly argued, most recently by Nicholas Maxwell, that the special theory of relativity is incompatible with the view that the future is in some degree undetermined; and Maxwell contends that this is a reason to reject that theory. In the present paper, an analysis is offered of the notion of indeterminateness (or "becoming") that is uniquely appropriate to the special theory of relativity, in the light of a set of natural conditions upon such a notion; and reasons (...) are given for regarding this conception as (not just formally consistent with relativity theory, but also) philosophically reasonable. The bearings upon Maxwell's program for quantum theory are briefly considered. (shrink)

Throughout this century many philosophers and physicists have gone for thc ‘big ki11’ regarding tenses. They have tried to show via McTaggart’s paradox and special relativity that tcnscs arc logically and physically impossible, rcspcctivcly. Ncithcr attempt succccds, though as I argue, both lcavc their mark. In thc iirst two sections of thc paper I introduce some conceptual difficulties for the tensed theory of time. The next section then discusses the standing 0f tenses in light of special relativity, cspccially rcccnt work (...) by Stcin on thc topic. I argue that, Stcin’s possibility thcorcm notwithstanding, special relativity is inconsistent with any philosophicully interesting conception of tense. Finally, I search for help for tenses in the broader context of quantum theory, Lorcntzian interpretations 0f time dilation/length contraction, and gcncral relativistic spacctimcs. I suggest that these avenues d0 not provide tenses the home for which some have hoped. (shrink)

In this paper I expound an argument which seems to establish that probabilism and special relativity are incompatible. I examine the argument critically, and consider its implications for interpretative problems of quantum theory, and for theoretical physics as a whole.

The manifest image is teeming with activity. Objects are booming and buzzing by, changing their locations and properties, vivid perceptions are replaced, and we seem to be inexorably slipping into the future. Time—or at least our experience in time— seems a very turbulent sort of thing. By contrast, time in the scientist image seems very still. The fundamental laws of physics don’t differentiate between past and future, nor do they pick out a present moment that flows. Except for a minus (...) sign in the relativistic metric, there are few differences between the temporal and spatial coordinates in natural science. We seem to have, to echo another debate, an “explanatory gap” between time as we find it in experience and as we find it in science. Reconciling these two images of the world is the principal goal of philosophy of time. (shrink)

A proof is given that there does not exist an event, that is not already in the past for some possible distant observer at the (our) moment that the latter is "now" for us. Such event is as "legally" past for that distant observer as is the moment five minutes ago on the sun for us (irrespective of the circumstance that the light of the sun cannot reach us in a period of five minutes). Only an extreme positivism: "that which (...) cannot yet be observed does not yet exist", can possibly withstand the conclusion concerned. Therefore, there is determinism, also in micro-physics. (shrink)

Algebraic quantum field theory provides a general, mathematically precise description of the structure of quantum field theories, and then draws out consequences of this structure by means of various mathematical tools -- the theory of operator algebras, category theory, etc.. Given the rigor and generality of AQFT, it is a particularly apt tool for studying the foundations of QFT. This paper is a survey of AQFT, with an orientation towards foundational topics. In addition to covering the basics of the theory, (...) we discuss issues related to nonlocality, the particle concept, the field concept, and inequivalent representations. We also provide a detailed account of the analysis of superselection rules by Doplicher, Haag, and Roberts (DHR); and we give an alternative proof of Doplicher and Robert's reconstruction of fields and gauge group from the category of physical representations of the observable algebra. The latter is based on unpublished ideas due to J. E. Roberts and the abstract duality theorem for symmetric tensor *-categories, a self-contained proof of which is given in the appendix. (shrink)

J. M. E. McTaggart, in a famous argument, denied the reality of time because he thought that passage or temporal becoming was essential for the existence of time and that passage was a self-contradictory concept. This denial of passage has provoked a vast literature, two of the most important contributions being C. D. Broad’s painstaking defence of passage in his Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy and D. C. Williams’ dazzling condemnation of it “The Myth of Passage.” -/- A careful reading of (...) these apparently opposed essays reveals that there is a common notion of passage that both philosophers endorse, the successive occurrence of sets of simultaneous events (assuming classical or Newtonian spacetime structure as background). This unexpected agreement provides a notion of the passage of time that, I claim, is lean enough to survive the criticisms of passage-deniers yet robust enough to satisfy the requirements of passage-affirmers. I undertake to describe and defend this notion. -/- . (shrink)

I propose that the passage of time is the successive occurrence of sets of simultaneous events (assuming classical or Newtonian spacetime structure as background). This conception of passage, I claim, is lean enough to survive the criticisms of passage-deniers while robust enough to satisfy the needs of passage-affirmers. I undertake to describe and defend this minimal notion of passage.

In his recent article On Relativity Theory and Openness of the Future (1991), Howard Stein proves not only that one can define an objective becoming relation in Minkowski spacetime, but that there is only one possible definition available if one accepts certain natural assumptions about what it is for becoming to occur and for it to be objective. Stein uses the definition supplied by his proof to refute an argument due to Rietdijk (1966, 1976), Putnam (1967) and Maxwell (1985, 1988) (...) that Minkowski spacetime leaves no room for objective becoming whatsoever. However, Stein's proof does not seem to go far enough. By considering only what events have become from the standpoint of any given event, Stein's uniqueness proof fails from the outset to allow for a more general kind of becoming whereby it is understood to occur from the standpoint of events on the particular worldlines followed by observers. This suggests that there may, after all, be more than one way to define objective becoming in Minkowski spacetime once each observer's worldline is allowed to figure in the definition. This suspicion is further aroused by two recent proposals for objective, worldline-dependent becoming due to Peacock (1992) and Muller (1992) who advocate ways of defining becoming that are not equivalent to the definition Stein's uniqueness proof delivers. Nevertheless, we show that Stein's uniqueness proofcan be extended in a natural way to cover this more general kind of becoming, provided one does not enrich standard Minkowski spacetime by privileging certain sets of worldlines over others in an unwarranted manner. Thus we aim to reinforce Stein's point that standard Minkowski spacetime does make room for objective becoming, but in essentially only one way, despite arguments and proposals to the contrary. (shrink)

In a recent paper, David Albert has suggested that no quantum theory can yield a description of the world unfolding in Minkowski spacetime. This conclusion is premature; a natural extension of Stein's notion of becoming in Minkowski spacetime to accommodate the demands of quantum nonseparability yields such an account, an account that is in accord with a proposal which was made by Aharonov and Albert but which is dismissed by Albert as a ‘mere trick’. The nature of such an account (...) is clarified by an extension to a relativistic quantum context of David Lewis' picture of objective chances evolving in time. 1 Introduction 2 Classical relativistic becoming 3 Relativistic quantum becoming, without collapse 4 Relativistic quantum becoming, with collapse 5 Objective chance, conditional probability, and definite properties 6 The nature of the wave function 7 Conclusion. (shrink)

Abstract: Presentism is the view that whatever exists presently exists. Without defending Presentism, I argue first that Presentists should be Time-Free Presentists – Presentists whose views do not imply that there exist irreducible times. Second, I argue that Presentists should accept Limited Thick Presentism, the view that 'the present' has some extension and is thereby neither durationlessly thin nor unlimitedly 'thick'. Third, before addressing several objections to Limited Time-Free Thick Presentism [LTFTP], I argue that defenders of LTFTP should accept that (...) 'temporal becoming' involves an overlapping succession of present entities, not a 'skipping' from one set of present entities to the next discrete set. (shrink)

This paper argues that recent arguments to the effect that the debate between presentism and eternalism lacks any metaphysical substance ultimately fail, although important lessons can be gleaned from them in how to formulate a non-vacuous version of presentism. It suggests that presentism can best be characterized in the context of spacetime theories. The resulting position is an ersatzist version of presentism that admits merely non-present entities as abstracta deprived of physical existence. Ersatzist presentism both escapes the charges of triviality (...) and promises to offer a route to solving the grounding problem which befalls its more traditional cousins. (shrink)

In the transition to Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity (SR), certain concepts that had previously been thought to be univocal or absolute properties of systems turn out not to be. For instance, mass bifurcates into (i) the relativistically invariant proper mass m0, and (ii) the mass relative to an inertial frame in which it is moving at a speed v = βc, its relative mass m, whose quantity is a factor γ = (1 – β2) -1/2 times the proper mass, (...) m = γm0. (shrink)

1.: In this paper I discuss Putnam’s view on time and the special theory of relativity. I first locate Putnam’s philosophical approach within a more general framework, essentially making reference to Sellar’s distinction between the scientific image and the manifest image of the world. I then reconstruct Putnam’s argument in favour of the reality of the future and the determinateness of truth-value for future tense sentences by showing that it is based on three premises that generate a contradiction. In the (...) second part of the paper I discuss Putnam’s argument both by using later results belonging to the foundations of STR and quantum mechanics, and by invoking some conceptual analysis on the pseudo-predicate “is real”. Since I will show that the presentists/eternalists debate is ill-founded if regarded as ontological, I will conclude that it boils down to our different practical attitudes towards past, present and future. (shrink)

Is tense real and objective? Can the fact that something is past, say, be wholly objective, consistent with special relativity? The answer is yes, but only so long as the distinction has no ontological ground. There is a closely related question. Is the contrast between the determinate and the indeterminate real and objective, consistent with relativity and quantum mechanics? The answer is again yes, but only if the contrast has no ontological ground. Various accounts of it are explored, according to (...) different approaches to quantum mechanics. The Everett interpretation is much the most successful in accounting for it. (shrink)