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236904

Temporal metaphysics in z-land

Simon Prosser

pp. 77-96

Abstract

John Perry has argued that language, thought and experience often contain unarticulated constituents. I argue that this idea holds the key to explaining away the intuitive appeal of the A-theory of time and the endurance theory of persistence. The A-theory has seemed intuitively appealing because the nature of temporal experience makes it natural for us to use one-place predicates like past to deal with what are really two-place relations, one of whose constituents is unarticulated. The endurance view can be treated in a similar way; the temporal boundaries of temporal parts of objects are unarticulated in experience and this makes it seem that the very same entity exists at different times.

Publication details

Published in:

(2006) Synthese 149 (1).

Pages: 77-96

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-004-6249-8

Full citation:

Prosser Simon (2006) „Temporal metaphysics in z-land“. Synthese 149 (1), 77–96.