Abstract

Time and Temporality in Perspective explores central topics in the contemporary analytic metaphysics of time such as the passage of time, the reality of tense, temporal ontology and persistence. The first part of the book is a sustained critique of traditional approaches to realism about tense, presenting two novel arguments that seek to demonstrate why they are misguided. The second part of the book develops an alternative approach described as a perspectivalism about temporal reality. According to this view, reality possesses a fundamental temporally perspectival structure that explains why it objectively divides into distinct past, present, and future compartments and illuminates the sense in which this compartmentalization is dynamic. The book examines how the debates over temporal ontology and persistence can be understood within the perspectivalist framework and defends a non-standard version of presentism. Time and Temporality in Perspective is essential reading for all scholars, researchers and advanced students of metaphysics and especially the philosophy of time.