Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- When Time Gets Off Track
- Burbury's Last Case: The Mystery of the Entropic Arrow
- Zeno's Arrow and the Significance of the Present
- Presentism, Ontology and Temporal Experience
- A Presentist's Refutation of Mellor's McTaggart
- Time and Degrees of Existence: A Theory of ‘Degree Presentism’
- McTaggart and the Truth about Time
- On Absolute Becoming and the Myth of Passage
- Time Travel and Modern Physics
- Freedom from the Inside Out
- On Stages, Worms and Relativity
- On Becoming, Cosmic Time and Rotating Universes
- How Relativity Contradicts Presentism
- Can Physics Coherently Deny the Reality of Time?
- Rememberances, Mementos, and Time-Capsules
A Presentist's Refutation of Mellor's McTaggart
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- When Time Gets Off Track
- Burbury's Last Case: The Mystery of the Entropic Arrow
- Zeno's Arrow and the Significance of the Present
- Presentism, Ontology and Temporal Experience
- A Presentist's Refutation of Mellor's McTaggart
- Time and Degrees of Existence: A Theory of ‘Degree Presentism’
- McTaggart and the Truth about Time
- On Absolute Becoming and the Myth of Passage
- Time Travel and Modern Physics
- Freedom from the Inside Out
- On Stages, Worms and Relativity
- On Becoming, Cosmic Time and Rotating Universes
- How Relativity Contradicts Presentism
- Can Physics Coherently Deny the Reality of Time?
- Rememberances, Mementos, and Time-Capsules
Summary
For twenty years, D. H. Mellor has promoted an influential defence of a view of time he first called the ‘tenseless’ view, but now associates with what he calls the ‘B-theory.’ It is his defence of this view, not the view itself, which is generally taken to be novel. It is organized around a forcefully presented attack on rival views which he claims to be a development of McTaggart's celebrated argument that the ‘A-series’ is contradictory. I will call this attack ‘Mellor's McTaggart.’ Although it has received much critical attention, it has not been well understood. For one thing, it has changed over the years in a way that is little appreciated. Whereas Mellor's (1981) original version amounts to a dilemma each horn of which contains a single strand of argument, later statements (1986, 1998) of the first horn contain a second strand of argument unannounced. I shall be concerned to disentangle these strands. I shall also show them to have been largely anticipated by Gareth Evans (1979). However, my main aim is not the clarification of Mellor's McTaggart, but its refutation. I shall show that there is a rival to Mellor's view of time against which the first horn of the dilemma begs the question both as originally presented, and as supplemented. This rival is a ‘Priorean’ version of the ‘presentist’ doctrine that only what is present exists.
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- Time, Reality and Experience , pp. 91 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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