Time, Language, and Ontology

This book brings together, in a novel way, an account of the structure of time with an account of our language and thought about time. Joshua Mozersky argues that it is possible to reconcile the human experience of time, which is centred on the present, with the objective conception of time, according to which all moments are intrinsically alike. He defends a temporally centreless ontology along with a tenseless semantics that is compatible with - and indeed helps to explain the need for - tensed language and thought. This theory of time also, it is argued, helps to elucidate the nature of change and temporal passage, neither of which need be denied nor relegated to the realm of subjective experience only. The book addresses a variety of topics including whether the past and future are real; whether temporal passage is a genuine phenomenon or merely a subjective illusion; how the asymmetry of time is to be understood; the nature of representation; how something can change its properties yet retain its identity; and whether objects are three-dimensional or four-dimensional. It is a wide-ranging examination of recent issues in metaphysics, philosophy of language and the philosophy of science and presents a compelling picture of the relationship of human beings to the spatiotemporal world.

M. Joshua Mozersky is Associate Professor in, and Head of, the Department of Philosophy at Queen's University. He works primarily on issues in the philosophy of science, ontology, and the philosophy of language. His articles have appeared in numerous journals including Philosophical Studies, Synthese, and International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, and in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time (OUP, 2011) and A Companion to the Philosophy of Time (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

- 1: Introduction: Time, tense, and the objective conception - 2: The reality of the future - 3: Restricting reality to the present - 4: Tensed predicates - 5: Experience and the present - 6: Objects and times - 7: Temporal parts - 8: The B-theory and the passage of time