According to conventional wisdom, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity showed that the flow of time is an illusion, and that reality is a fixed block. And philosophers from Augustine to McTaggart have found the idea of time’s passage to be incoherent. However, argues James Sares, the idea that time’s flow is an illusion is itself incoherent. He uses Hegel’s dialectical logic to prove that time is real, since any denial of its reality must fall into self-contradiction.
1. The denial of time’s passing
From Zeno to McTaggart, the history of philosophy contains a number of arguments against the reality of time. Even philosophers who think time is real have admitted the difficulty of making sense of it. Augustine asks how time exists if past and future do not, while the present takes no time. Kant asks how time can have a beginning if a beginning implies a change, hence a prior time. And yet how can time have no beginning – hence be actually infinite – if particular, finite moments of time’s passing can never add up to this infinity?
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You might think your experience is the authority on the truth of the world, but you might be too trapped in it to see it for the illusion it is.
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Today, many scientists and philosophers of time accept the “B-theory” of time, the view that time is just a static series of tenseless moments and relations, against the view that time actually flows from past to future, especially given problems introduced by Einstein’s theory of relativity. In science and philosophy alike, the denial of time’s passing remains a popular position to do away with the conceptual difficulties it implies.
2. Our experience of time’s passing
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