01deeper
Passage
Either the present is metaphysically privileged and time genuinely passes, or all times are equally real and passage describes how time is experienced.
Is the present special in itself, or only special to whoever is in it?
Philosophical questions about time
Whether time passes is a real question, not a figure of speech.
Time feels like something that flows, carrying a moving present with it. One family of views takes that flow to be a genuine feature of reality; another takes all times to be equally real and the sense of passage to belong to the experience rather than the world. Almost every other question about time—travel, change, mortality, whether the past can be altered—depends on which of those you accept.
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Six tensions
A route through the question
02deeper
Experience
The sense of duration and flow is vivid and reliable, yet an experience of passage is not by itself evidence that anything passes.
What in your experience of time would have to change if time did not flow?
03gentle
Change
For something to change it must have incompatible properties at different times while remaining one thing, which requires an account of how it persists.
What makes the thing that changed the same thing that existed before?
04deeper
Direction
Time has a marked asymmetry—we remember one direction and affect the other—and explaining that asymmetry is harder than noticing it.
Why can you influence the future but only record the past?
05deeper
Loops
A closed causal loop need not be contradictory, but it does raise the question of where its contents came from.
If an event causes itself, has anything been explained?
06gentle
Finitude
Limited time is what makes ordering, urgency and commitment matter, so removing the limit may remove the point rather than preserving it.
Which of your commitments depends for its value on time running out?
Facilitation path
How to hold the conversation
- 01Say whether you think the present is metaphysically special, and what follows if it is not.
- 02Distinguish claims about how time is experienced from claims about how time is.
- 03Take one concrete case—memory, travel, or a change in an object—and apply your view to it.
- 04Name the consequence of your view you find hardest to accept.
Reviewed next steps
Open a question in depth
Other guided routes
Change the question
LifePhilosophical questions about lifeA life can go well in more than one way.ExistenceExistential questionsMeaning is not the same question as mood.ConsciousnessPhilosophical questions about consciousnessThe hard part is not intelligence. It is experience.MoralityEthical dilemmas and moral questionsA dilemma is only useful once you name the rule behind the verdict.RealityPhilosophical questions about reality and knowledgeDoubt is easy to state and hard to use.LovePhilosophical questions about loveLove is a feeling, a practice—and a problem of freedom.DeathPhilosophical questions about deathThe difficulty is explaining who the harm belongs to.
Reference desk
Sources and further reading
- 01
- 02Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Time
Long-form survey covering passage, direction and the standard positions.
- 03
- 04Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Being and Becoming in Modern Physics
On how the passage question interacts with physical theory.