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Temporal Becoming Minus The Moving-Now

1989; Wiley; Volume: 23; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2215880

1468-0068

David Zeilicovici,

History and advancements in chemistry

Being later than is an order relation which, ranging over moments and events, generates the common static time series. This much is, I think, generally accepted, the only open question being whether this series is all there is to time. J. M. E. McTaggart (cf. 1927, ch. 33) thought it was not. He believed that each moment is not just later than, or simultaneous with, or earlier than some other moments, but also absolutely and objectively past, present or future. Absolutely yet not permanently, for the future necessarily becomes first present and then past. It is this movement, the dynamic aspect of time, the phenomenon of temporal becoming, which, if real, is not accounted for by the static time series. In order to correct this failure McTaggart introduced the (in)famous moving (upon the ordered points of the static series)-NOW and, with it, the need to explain, inter alia, the strange meaning of the movement of what is involved in the definition of 'movement'. And how, indeed, can the event of the NOW reaching t be a member of the same series t belongs to ? This has led C.D. Broad (cf. 1938, pp. 277-8; 1959) to consider the rather wild possibility of two-dimensional time. The idea was to have the NOW of common time move by occupying different common moments at different meta-moments. But, according to McTaggart, meta-time would not be full time unless it possessed a moving-(meta-) NOW of its own. Hence the charge of infinite vicious regress in time dimensions (see J.J. C. Smart 1963, p. 136).