March, 18, 2022, h. 16-18 CET

Time, it might be said, is concerned with the nature of the past, the present and the future, with variants of presentism and eternalism and (non-static) growing block the leading metaphysical theories. But this is hardly clarifying. Presentism is often characterized as the thesis that only the present exists, while the others embrace more. If the positions and the distinctiveness of presentism should turn on the dubious assumption of a property of ‘existing’ (present tense) or ‘being present’, then the substantive nature of the debates may well deserve to be viewed as dubious. Another questionable assumption, I argue, is that temporal relations and our understanding of tense requires a commitment to events (at least as concrete if not abstract particulars). The tenseless predication required for the characterization of events generates the static image of events standing (tenselessly) in an external relation of temporal order—an order that seems able to be modeled by applying mathematical kinds of ordering. The success of Einstein’s special relativity, interpreted as if it requires a theory of space-time events, has led many philosophers to accept the static image. These are fly bottles. To plan an escape, I introduce in contradistinction to a modest event language Le, a safe mode language Lt wherein tenselessness comes solely from the use of quantifiers (and accompanying connectives) and all primitive predicates get tense inflections. It is argued that substantive differences in theories of time can be captured within Lt and that embracing events is not required for understanding tense inflections. It is hoped that, without events and the static image they bring, a new interpretation of special relativity as a non-static theory may be developed. This interpretation has the striking consequence that the implications of special relativity have been misconstrued. A clock runs slow relative to an inertial frame in such a way that its hands always stay in lock-step with another running at a different rate relative to a frame. It will be found, however, that this is of no consolation to presentism.

Audio - Slides