Temporal Becoming and the A- and B- Theories of Time :: Philosophy Philosophical Time Papers

Temporal Becoming and the A- and B- Theories of Time It is provoke to note that many of Saint Augustines concerns about time around 400AD be the same as we have today. For example, Augustine was puzzled about the constitution of the quality between the past, the collapse and the future. He was also concerned about the nature and status of the apparent flow of time. In this try out we will select a much more recent approach to time that came to the forrader in the twentieth century. In 1908 James McTaggart published an article in Mind entitled The Unreality of Time, in which, as the title implies, he argued that there is in reality no such thing as time. Now although this claim was in itself startling, probably what was heretofore more meaningful than McTaggarts arguments was his way of stating them. It was in this paper that McTaggart first drew his now exemplification distinction between two ways of saying when things happen. In this essay we shall outline these ways of d escribing events and then discuss the merits and demerits of each, and examine what has become know as the tensed versus tenseless debate on temporal becoming. One way which we speak, become and conceive of time is that time is something that flows or passes from the future to the apply and from the present to the past. When viewed in this way, events which are present have a special empirical status. Whatever may be the case with regard to the reality or unreality of events in the future and the past, events that are in the present represent with a capital E. It can then be postulated that it is the present or now that shifts to even later times. If events in time (or moments of time) are conceived in terms of past, present and future, or by means of the tenses, then they form what McTaggart called the A-series (from which the A-theory of time is derived). This graphic symbol of change is commonly referred to as temporal becoming, and gives rise to well known perplexities conc erning two what does the shifting and the type of shift involved, which we will discuss later. On the new(prenominal) hand, we experience events in time as occurring in succession, one aft(prenominal) another, and as simultaneous with other events. When viewed in this way, events stand in divers(a) different temporal relations to each other but no one event, or set of events, is singled out as having the property of world present or as occurring now.