Abstract

This chapter is a detailed treatment of Williams’s metaphysics of time. He is a four-dimensionalist. On this view, reality is fundamentally tenseless and events are timelessly strung out in a four-dimensional manifold, standing in B-theoretic earlier than/later than relations to each other. The past, present, and future are all equally real. Time is just another dimension or mode of extent like the three dimensions of space. He calls the theory ‘the pure manifold theory’. Williams’s motivations for the pure manifold theory are canvassed, along with his criticism of competing theories of time such as presentism and the growing block theory. This chapter corrects misinterpretations of Williams’s metaphysics of time, especially his position on time travel and the passage of time, arguing that he did believe that time travel is metaphysically possible and that the passage of time is explained in terms of the B-theoretic distribution of content throughout the manifold.