Temporal Passage and Temporal Parts

Abstract

There are two perennial philosophical issues that have recently received considerable attention. The first concerns identity through time, and the second concerns temporal becoming.1 The purpose of this paper is to explore one important connection between these two issues. More specifically, I shall attempt to demonstrate that if one accepts the doctrine of four dimensional objects and temporal parts, then the tensed or A-theory of time cannot adequately explain the sense in which individual things, either persons or non-persons, are moving toward the future, or the sense in which the future is moving toward individual things. If true this would, in effect, render the tensed theory incompatible with the doctrine of temporal parts. Thus, it is a thesis worth considering and a useful place to begin a discussion of it is with an explication of (one version of) the tensed theory of time. One of the most familiar features of our experience is the passage of time. Events which are once in the future become present and then recede into the more and more distant past as time passes. Not only events, but individual things such as sticks, stones and persons are presumed to be continually moving through time toward their eventual destruction or death. How is such temporal becoming, passage or change to be understood? According to the most prevalent version of the tensed or A-theory of time, temporal passage is to be understood literally; as ascribing to things and events the successive gain and loss of the metaphysically monadic temporal properties of pastness, presentness and futurity. Given this version of the tensed theory and the view that individual things are wholes composed of temporal parts, can any sense be given to the claim that individual things move through time from one moment to another? I do not think so, but before arguing the point we must clarify the doctrine of temporal parts. Pre-analytically ordinary objects, including persons, are continuants; they persist (or exist) at more than one (or through) time. The philosophical issue concerns the analysis of that truth. What is a continuant and how does a continuant persist through time? The doctrine of four dimensional objects which incorporates the notion of temporal parts is one answer that has found favor