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Worlds Enough For Time

1991; Wiley; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2216090

1468-0068

John Bigelow,

Quantum Mechanics and Applications

Time passes. Time passes. This is surely the most important thing about time. Yet it is also the most mysterious. The more you think about the passage of time, the less coherent it seems. I will describe one way we might try to make sense of the passing of time. What I propose, more precisely, is an account of what it is that we believe time to be like. I will not give an argument to prove that we are correct in our conception of time as something which passes. Einstein's theory of relativity suggests that, as a matter of fact, our naive conception of time is deeply mistaken. I will not argue that the folk theory of time can be defended against physics: only that it can be defended from purely philosophical objections, from allegations of internal incoherence, from arguments which seem to show that folk theory can be shown on its own terms to be inconsistent. I have long been intrigued by J.M.E. McTaggart's notorious argument for the Unreality of Time (see McTaggart, 1908, 1927, 1934, and Broad, 1938, for a full exposition and critique, and Dummett, 1960 for a sympathetic exposition and defense, and Gale, 1967 for bibliographic leads). On my reading, the argument hinges on two plausible premises. The first is that it is one of the essential properties of time that it is something which passes. The second is that the notion of the passage of time is incoherent, and involves either a logical contradiction, or a vicious circularity, or a vicious regress. Together, these premises seem to entail that time is unrealthat there is no time, that nothing ever really occurs before or after anything else, but only appears to do so. Many are less bold than McTaggart. They think time is real. Yet they have a hard time dispelling the notion that time is essentially something which passes. So they search for some watered down, logically consistent sense in which time can coherently be described