M. Joshua Mozersky, “Time, Language, and Ontology: The World from the B-Theoretic Perspective” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Is the present time uniquely real, or do past or future equally exist? Does saying the word “now” simply express the speaker’s current position in time the way “here” expresses her current position in space? In Time, Language,
In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
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Show Notes
Is the present time uniquely real, or do past or future equally exist? Does saying the word “now” simply express the speaker’s current position in time the way “here” expresses her current position in space? In Time, Language, and Ontology: The World from the B-Theoretic Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2015), M. Joshua Mozersky, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, argues for ontological commitment to past, present, and future alike, and provides an account of tensed language in which the underlying meaning of “was”, “is”, and “will be” is actually tenseless. Mozersky deftly defends his eternalist view by countering arguments for the main alternatives, in which only the present exists, or at most only the past and the present exist, and by showing how eternalism provides the best account of the passage of time and is not just consistent with three-dimensionalism (or endurantism) but also provides the best account of it.