Abstract
In our direct experience time is strikingly different from space: time has a dynamical aspect that space completely lacks. This feeling of flow and passage is well represented in the A-theory of time, in which the concept of a moving Now is central. Given the clarity and immediacy of our experience of temporal flow it seems that the rival “static” B-theory, in which there are only unchanging temporal relations, starts with an enormous handicap: whereas the A-theory directly explains our experience of time, the B-theory must apparently squirm itself out of the problem of explaining it away as an illusion.
However, on second thought it is not so clear how the A-explanation of our experience is supposed to work. Even if the A-theory were to be correct and the flow of time an objective feature of reality, there still is the question of how this objective motion of the Now could make itself felt in our apperception of time. The problem is that the concepts of objective passage and becoming that are central in the A-theory do not make contact with anything we know about how natural processes work and therefore cannot help us to understand our perception in a naturalistic, scientific way. This problem is acutely illustrated when we look at recent philosophical work on the A-theory. These approaches usually accept tenses as a primitive concept (by employing primitive tense operators). But these primitive tenses do not relate to what we know about how time perception functions; from a physical or physiological point of view it is mysterious how primitive tenses could help to explain our intuitions.
By contrast, the concepts used in the B-theory of time do connect with scientific theory. Perhaps surprisingly, explaining our experience of passage has better prospects in the B-theory than in the A-theory.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Balashov, Y., and M. Janssen. 2003. Presentism and relativity. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54: 327–346.
Butterfield, J. 1984. Seeing the present. Mind 93: 161–176.
Callender, C. 2008. The common now. Philosophical Issues 18: 339–361.
Dainton, B. 2010. Time and space, 2nd ed. Durham: Acumen Publishing Limited.
Dieks, D. 2006. Becoming, relativity and locality. In The ontology of spacetime, ed. D. Dieks, 157–167. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Dolev, Y. 2007. Time and realism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Hinchliff, M. 1996. The puzzle of change. Nous: 30, Supplement; Philosophical Perspectives 10, Metaphysics, 119–136.
Hinchliff, M. 2000. A defense of presentism in a relativistic setting. Philosophy of Science 67: S575–S586.
Le Poidevin, R. 2009. The experience and perception of time. In The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, ed. E.N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/time-experience/
Markosian, N. 2004. A defense of presentism. In Oxford studies in metaphysics, vol. 1, 47–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mather, G. 2010. Motion perception. Available at http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/home/George_Mather/Motion/index.html
Maudlin, T. 2007. On the passing of time. In The metaphysics within physics, 104–142. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McTaggart, J.M.E. 1908. The unreality of time. Mind 17: 457–474.
Oaklander, N. 2004. The ontology of time. Amherst: Prometheus Books.
Price, H. 2011. On the flow of time. In The oxford handbook of philosophy of time, ed. C. Callender, 279–311. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Skow, B. 2009. Relativity and the moving spotlight. The Journal of Philosophy 106: 666–678.
Skow, B. 2012. Why does time pass? Nous 46: 223–242. Also available at http://web.mit.edu/bskow/www/research/whydoestimepass.pdf
Tallant, J. 2010. A sketch of a presentist theory of passage. Erkenntnis 73: 133–140.
Zimmerman, D. 2005. The A-theory of time, the B-theory of time, and ‘taking tense Seriously’. Dialectica 59: 401–457.
Zimmerman, D. 2008. The privileged present: Defending an “A-theory” of time. In Contemporary debates in metaphysics, ed. T. Sider, J. Hawthorne, and D.W. Zimmerman, 211–225. Oxford: Blackwell.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dieks, D. (2016). Physical Time and Experienced Time. In: Dolev, Y., Roubach, M. (eds) Cosmological and Psychological Time. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 285. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22590-6_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22590-6_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22589-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22590-6
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)