more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
Maybe both the past and the future are real, determined by our current temporal perspective. Past is then events capable of having a causal influence upon events near us, and future is events we can affect, but from which we receive no information.
Gist of Idea
Maybe past (which affects us) and future (which we can affect) are both real
Source
Michael Dummett (Truth and the Past [2001], 5)
Book Ref
Dummett,Michael: 'Truth and the Past (Dewey Lectures)' [Columbia 2004], p.86
A Reaction
This is the Four-Dimensional view, which is opposed to Presentism. Might immediate unease is that it gives encouragement to fortune-tellers, whom I have always dismissed with 'You can't see the future, because it doesn't exist'.
| 15202 | Eternity coexists with passing time, as the centre of a circle coexists with its circumference [Aquinas] |
| 8197 | Maybe past (which affects us) and future (which we can affect) are both real [Dummett] |
| 15024 | The spotlight theorists accepts eternal time, but with a spotlight of the present moving across it [Sider] |
| 17960 | Eternalism says all times are equally real, and future and past objects and properties are real [Merricks] |
| 14020 | 'Eternalism' is the thesis that reality includes past, present and future entities [Crisp,TM] |
| 15104 | The 'moving spotlight' theory makes one time privileged, while all times are on a par ontologically [Cameron] |
| 19026 | If time is symmetrical between past and future, why do they look so different? [Vetter] |
| 22988 | The block universe theory says entities of all times exist, and time is the B-series [Baron/Miller] |