Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Here's a link to an article by Dean Zimmerman defending the intuitive (or "A-Theory") view of time. http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/zimmerman/PrivilegedPresent.pdf  The intuitive view is that there is such a thing as the present, the "moving now," that at this present is ontologically privileged. Privileged? Sounds like a bad thing to modern sensibilities. "Check your privilege, nowness!" At any rate, we intuitively feel confident the now is real, whereas the past is uncertain and the future is promised to no one. Descartes' "cogito" is in the present tense. The certainty is "I think" not "I thought" or "I will think." From this epistemological privilege we infer an ontological one -- the intuition is that the now is more real, which is one reason self-help authors always urge us to "live here now."  Zimmerman believes, roughly, that the inference is a sound one and the self-help auth...

The headline of this post, "What Makes Time Special?" Is the title of a recent book by philosopher Craig Callender, one of the co-winners this year of the Lakatos Award, for the best work in the philosophy of science. With due respect to the other co-winner, Sabina Leonelli, my arbitrary spotlight of curiosity today falls on Professor Callender, perhaps in part just because his name looks a lot like "calendar," which is a great name to have if you're going to be writing about Time as a philosophical subject! Callender begins the book in a striking way, "Time is a big invisible thing that will kill you," he writes. That sounds like a slightly morbid and slightly precocious child's effort to philosophize about time. I gather that is what Callender means for it to sound like. I also gather, from only having skimmed the book, that Callender doesn't really present any other view of time more sophisticated than the one he starts off with. It ...

As I was saying last weekend, Valdi Ingthorsson, (portrayed here) of Sweden's Lund University, has written a book on the philosophy of time. Much of it is devoted to a reconsideration of McTaggart's argument to the effect that time is not real.  To summarize ruthlessly, Ingthorsson says that if McTaggart's argument is taken as a stand-alone, it fails, because it begs the question. McTaggart is arguing that IF reality is a single block, THEN it can't be divided in any meaningful way into that which has happened already and that which hasn't. But that is just to say that if it is indivisible, then it is indivisible: which isn't informative. If one is willing to contend with McTaggart's idealistic metaphysics as a whole, OTOH, then his argument serves a useful purpose. It draws out some of the implications of some parts of that whole.  Ingthorsson also contends that the  philosophical literature about McTaggart's paradox has been sharply split betwe...