The Seminars of Philosophy of Perception, Mind, and Language
The Seminars of Perception, Mind, and Language (former Seminars of Philosophy of Language and Mind) take place every year since 2001 at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Milan. The meetings aim at being an opportunity for people working in analytic philosophy to debate the latest directions of research.
The meetings are structured as a 45-50 minutes presentation, followed by an extensive discussion time. They are open to anyone interested in the topic, especially undergraduate and Ph.D. students. The language of the talks is either Italian or English.
Sven Rosenkranz (ICREA - Universitat de Barcelona)
May 19 MON — 12.30-14.30
Sala Riunioni — Direzione del Dipartimento (Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milano)
Nothing To Come - On A Dynamic Metaphysics of Time
(Talk based on joint work with Fabrice Correia, Université de Neuchâtel.)
Abstract: The Growing Block Theory of time, or GBT for short, conceives of temporal reality as being in a constant accumulative process of becoming: always things come to exist that did not exist before, while never anything ceases to exist. It is also an essential ingredient of GBT that always, there is an edge of becoming – a last moment preceding no other. We owe the idea of temporal reality as a growing block to C. D. Broad who, in his Scientific Thought (1923), provides us with a first characterisation of GBT. Broad’s characterisation has two shortcomings: it presupposes an ontology of exclusively instantaneous things in time, and it proves to lack the resources to adequately respond to the sceptical challenge that, for all we know, the edge of becoming is located, not in our present, but in the future – a challenge a statement of which we find in Bourne (2002), Braddon-Michtell (2004) and Merricks (2006). The difficulty to respond to the sceptical challenge is further aggravated by recent worries, expressed by Williamson in his 2013 Modal Logic as Metaphysics, that the notion of presentness, at work in both Broad’s version of GBT and standard formulations of presentism, proves too elusive to be theoretically illuminating. The aim is to come up with a clean and simple version of GBT that accommodates an ontology of non-instantaneous things in time, does not draw on any presentness-predicate in addition to familiar tense-logical and quantificational resources, and yet still proves strong enough to answer the sceptical challenge in a constructive way. Pursuit of this aim can thus be seen as an attempt to improve upon the characterisation, and defence, of GBT that we gave in earlier work (Correia and Rosenkranz 2013).