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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] |
| 22430 | If we understand a statement, we know the circumstances of its truth [Quine] |
| 22432 | Normally conditionals have no truth value; it is the consequent which has a conditional truth value [Quine] |
| 22431 | Good algorithms and theories need many occurrences of just a few elements [Quine] |
| 22433 | It is important that the quantification over temporal entities is timeless [Quine] |
| 22437 | Logical languages are rooted in ordinary language, and that connection must be kept [Quine] |
| 22434 | Reduction to logical forms first simplifies idioms and grammar, then finds a single reading of it [Quine] |
| 22435 | The logician's '→' does not mean the English if-then [Quine] |
| 22438 | Philosophy is largely concerned with finding the minimum that science could get by with [Quine] |
| 22436 | Logicians don't paraphrase logic into language, because they think in the symbolic language [Quine] |