L. Nathan Oaklander is one of the leading philosophers of time defending the tenseless or B-Theory of time. He has remained at the forefront of this field since the early 1980s and today he is arguably the most formidable opponent of the tensed or A-theory of time. Much of the direction of the debate in this field for the past twenty years or so, especially in regards to the new tenseless theory of time, has been influenced by Oaklander's work. This (...) book presents a carefully argued defense of the tenseless theory of time. The topics discussed include: the ontology of A- and B-theories of time; presentism; the open future theory; the A/B theory; defending the B-theory of time; temporal experience; temporal semantics; and time, identity, responsibility, and freedom. (shrink)

There is a common form of problem, to be found in many areas of philosophy, concerning the relationship between our perspective on reality and reality itself. We make statements (or form judgements) about how things are from a given standpoint or perspective. We make the statement ‘it is raining’ from the standpoint of the present time, for example, or the statement‘it is here’ from the standpoint of where we are, or the statement ‘I am glad’ from the standpoint of a (...) subject. In each of these cases, the statement has a certain ‘aspect’ or perspectival character in virtue of which its truth is capable of varying from one standpoint to another. Thus the statement ‘it is raining’ is tensed, the statement ‘it is here’ is ‘spatiocentric’ and the statement ‘I am glad’ is first-personal. The problem we then face is to determine whether this aspect is a feature of the reality which is described or merely a feature of the statement by which it is described. Is reality itself somehow tensed or spatiocentric or firstpersonal or is it merely that we describe a tenseless or spatially uncentered or impersonal reality from a tensed or spatiocentric or first-personal point of view? (shrink)

Most of us would want to say that it is true that Socrates taught Plato. According to realists about past facts,1 this is made true by the fact that there is, located in the past, i.e., earlier than now, at least one real event that is the teaching of Plato by Socrates. Presentists, however, in denying that past events and facts exist2 cannot appeal to such facts to make their past-tensed statements true. So what is a presentist to do?

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)

In this book and the companion volume The Tenseless Theory of Time: A Critical Examination, Craig undertakes the first thorough appraisal of the arguments for and against the tensed and tenseless theories of time.

Most of us would want to say that it is true that Socrates taught Plato. According to realists about past facts, this is made true by the fact that there is, located in the past, i.e., earlier than now, at least one real event that is the teaching of Plato by Socrates. Presentists, however, in denying that past events and facts exist cannot appeal to such facts to make their past-tensed Statements true. So what is a presentist to do?There are (...) at least three conditions that would ideally be met in a satisfactory solution to this problem:a) It must preserve our views about which Statements are true and which falseb) It must be transparent what the truthmakers are for those Statementsc) It must accommodate the truth-value links between various times. (shrink)