Abstract

In this, the Henriette Hertz Philosophical Lecture for 1965, Geach adopts a shotgun technique to save Time from the reductionists, both physicalistic and idealistic. The victims of the blasts are variously Quine, Smart, and McTaggart; Russell does not escape unscathed either. At the back of Geach's seeming arbitrary dismissal of various forms and consequences of the reduction of Time lurks an ontology of substance fortified by what Geach envisages as the successful development of a logic of temporal concepts based on modal logic. The key to this ontology emerges at crucial points as the basic inviolability of first-person knowledge and discourse: e.g., "we do know that our plans and purposes radically alter our physical environment, and there's an end on't; any contrary [deterministic] theory, however plausibly argued, just has to be false".—E. A. R.