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Full Idea
Quine's view is that time is 'space-like'. Past objects are as real as present ones; they're just temporally distant, just as spatially distant objects are just as real as the ones around here.
Gist of Idea
Quine holds time to be 'space-like': past objects are as real as spatially remote ones
Source
report of Willard Quine (Mr Strawson on Logical Theory [1953]) by Theodore Sider - Logic for Philosophy 7.3.1
Book Ref
Sider,Theodore: 'Logic for Philosophy' [OUP 2010], p.187
A Reaction
Something is a wrong with a view that says that a long-dead person is just as real as one currently living. Death is rather more than travelling to a distant place. Arthur Prior responded to Quine by saying 'tense operators' are inescapable.
| 13713 | Quine holds time to be 'space-like': past objects are as real as spatially remote ones [Quine, by Sider] |
| 15193 | The new tenseless theory offers indexical truth-conditions, instead of a reductive analysis [Le Poidevin] |
| 15066 | B-theorists say tensed sentences have an unfilled argument-place for a time [Fine,K] |
| 22938 | To say that the past causes the present needs them both to be equally real [Le Poidevin] |
| 22939 | The B-series doesn't seem to allow change [Le Poidevin] |
| 22940 | If the B-universe is eternal, why am I trapped in a changing moment of it? [Le Poidevin] |
| 14734 | The B-series involves eternalism, and the reduction of tense [Sider] |
| 14736 | The B-theory is adequate, except that it omits to say which time is present [Sider] |
| 22901 | The B-series needs a revised view of causes, laws and explanations [Bardon] |
| 22896 | The B-series is realist about time, but idealist about its passage [Bardon] |
| 22903 | The B-series adds directionality when it accepts 'earlier' and 'later' [Bardon] |
| 23007 | The B-series can have a direction, as long as it does not arise from temporal flow [Baron/Miller] |