Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Abstract

1. I argue that the debate between the so-called presentists and eternalists either lacks substance or is merely pragmatical.
2. Consequently, I show that such a debate has no implications whatsoever both for our understanding of Minkowski spacetime and for notions like change, persistence and becoming.
3. In particular, becoming should not be construed as presupposing an ontological asymmetry between past (or present) and future, but as the successive occurrence of timelike-related events, an issue related to the various arrows that have been taken to mark the asymmetry of time.