Philosophy of Time and Space
Philosophy of Time and SpaceMickey Mantle: What time is it?
Yogi Berra: Do you mean right now?
Though there are many analogies between time and space, there appear to be three commonplace yet deeply perplexing features of time that reveal it to be quite unlike space. These can be called ‘orientation’, ‘flow’ and ‘presence’. By orientation I mean that there is a direction to time, a temporal order between events which is not merely a reflection of how they are observed (what McTaggart 1908/1968 labelled the B-series time). Assertions that objects stand in spatial relations, such as to the left of, or above, or to the north of explicitly depend upon the position from which they are asserted or upon arbitrary, conventionally established spatial frameworks. There is nothing intrinsic about them; the objects involved are, so to speak, indifferent to them. Temporal relations are not like that — times are not just arranged along, as it were, a line but are successive along that imaginary line. Whether one event is before or after another is not (altogether) dependent upon how, or from where, they are viewed. Nature appears to respect temporal orientation, as enshrined in the laws of thermodynamics, though it remains a deep mystery exactly how the temporally symmetric basic laws of physics ground strongly asymmetric temporal processes (see Sklar 1993).
However, temporal orientation is perhaps not so peculiar as the features I mark by the terms ‘flow’ and ‘presence’ (which McTaggart called the A-series time). These refer to the apparent and familiar fact that there is one, constantly advancing, distinctive time, the current time, which we mark by the word ‘now’. Facts — if they really are facts rather than artefacts — such as ‘it is now 1997’ are not reportable without reference to this special time. For example, on the face of it at least, we cannot translate ‘it is now 1997’ into the philosophically more anodyne: ‘statements of the form “it is now 1997″ are true when uttered in 1997’ for such claims neglect to mention the crucial point that now is 1997. Sometimes I need to know what time it is. What I need to know is the conventionally indexed name of the time which is simultaneous with now. It is not enough to find out that, for example, 2:00 PM on such and such a date is simultaneous with this experience unless my notion of this experience already contains covert reference to now. That is, while it is obvious that the word ‘this’ means something like ‘the thing I am indicating,’ the tense in ‘am indicating’ is necessary for the referential task of ‘this’ to succeed. If ‘this’ meant ‘the thing I am [tenselessly] indicating’ then ‘this’ would be ambiguous since I have indicated many things throughout my life. Otherwise, the fact that these experiences occur (tenselessly) at 2:00 PM on such and such a date would not tell me that now is 2:00 PM on...
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