Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

When am I? A Tense Time for Some Tense Theorists?

2002; Routledge; Volume: 80; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/713659472

1471-6828

Craig Bourne,

Computability, Logic, AI Algorithms

When am I? A Tense Time for Some Tense Theorists?Is there anything more certain than the knowledge we have that we are present?It would be a scandal if our best theory of time could not guarantee such knowledge; yet I shall show that certain theories of time (such as Tooley's growing block model and McCall's branching model) cannot guarantee it.Only Presentism and the tenseless theory survive.The rest must be rejected. I: The Present ProblemThere is a clear partition between tensed and tenseless theories of time: essentially, tense theorists assert that in some objective, mind-independent sense, the present is privileged, whereas tenseless theorists assert that all times are real, no one of which is ontologically privileged.Many tense theorists hold that more than one time is real, yet one among them is privileged, namely the present.This, however, raises the question of how we can know that we are present and not past (or future).I shall call this the Present Problem:Given that we do know we are present, and that it is absurd to doubt it, any adequate theory of time must find a way to guarantee such knowledge.