The Systematic Failure of the Philosophy of Time

Since the twentieth century, almost every scientific field concerned with time has made substantive progress. Physics moved from special to general relativity to quantum field theory, delivering precise mathematical structures of spacetime and testable empirical predictions. Neuroscience located the cerebral mechanisms of time perception and quantified subjective time distortion. Cognitive science measured the architectures of temporal memory, time estimation, and temporal representation. Computer science developed formalized temporal logics and partial-order temporal models for concurrent systems. Only the philosophy of time is the exception. From McTaggart 1908 to Cameron 2015, for over a century the discipline's central debate has not departed from the same set of questions: whether time passes, whether the past is real, whether the present is privileged, whether A-properties reduce to B-relations. The same questions, the same terminology, the same dichotomy (A-theory vs B-theory), the same back-and-forth, the same non-convergence. The discipline has been arguing in place for more than a hundred years. This stagnation has a sharper feature. The defenders of each position have long possessed the tools to dissolve their opponents but have, generally and persistently, declined to use them. The basic concepts on which any mainstream position relies — block, growing edge, moving spotlight, tensed properties, tenseless facts — can all be dissolved by the same kind of foundational interrogation: What is this object? On what does its ontological status rest? How is it distinguished from other basic objects? This interrogation requires no external theoretical resource; it merely applies, symmetrically, to the opponent's shared core primitives the same standard moves each position uses to attack others. Yet the actual form of disciplinary debate is that each position's attack stops precisely at the opponent's core primitives: B-theory attacks A-theory's rate of passage but does not interrogate the "event" A-theory uses; A-theory attacks B-theory's obligation to explain temporal experience but does not interrogate the tenseless facts B-theory uses; Presentism attacks Eternalism's "now" problem but does not interrogate the ontological grounds of the block as an object; Eternalism in turn attacks Presentism's truthmaker problem but does not interrogate the tensed properties Presentism uses. This stopping is neither academic courtesy nor respect for opponents. Defenders of each position know perfectly well that their own position rests on equally unfounded primitives; attacking the opponent's foundations would immediately trigger a symmetric attack on their own. The discipline has thus reached a kind of informed, mutually permitted silence: each side licenses the opponent's core primitives in exchange for licence over its own. This silence has lasted for over a century.