Michel Bitbol

In his book _The Empirical Stance_, Bas van Fraassen develops a strong and subtle attack on materialism. This chapter amplifies this criticism from a mainly neo-Kantian standpoint, and identifies by contrast some reasons why van Fraassen tends to baulk at the ultimate consequences of his contest. It first reviews van Fraassen's construal of materialism as a _stance_, and examines some motives many thinkers have to resist this idea. It goes on to describe the drifting conceptions of ‘matter’ according to materialists, and states two motives to be less indulgent than van Fraassen for the particulate conception of matter. The chapter then documents the first motive: loss of the basic cognitive conditions that would enable the particulate conception of matter to provide us with a coherent and unified representation. It also examines a general criterion of materiality, beyond the circular statement that matter is composed of material particles: matter must be both objective and able to manifest itself in space-time. The chapter then applies this criterion and finds difficulties on both sides of the Cartesian divide. It then states a meta-value (progressiveness, open-mindedness) that is shared by materialists to a certain extent, but shows that both empiricism and neo-Kantianism fare better with respect to this meta-value. Finally some limitations in van Fraassen's position that prevent him from offering a far enough reaching critique of materialism are presented.

A concept of the ‘actual now’ is introduced. The ‘actual now’ is negatively characterized by the fact that it is absent from the time-series. This does not mean that the ‘actual now’ is outside the time-series. For saying so would wrongly suggest the existence of an ‘outside’ where the ‘actual now’ could be located. Instead, one considers that the ‘actual now’ is just the name of ‘that with respect to which’ any event can be said to be past or future, yet being no event by itself. It holds the same role with respect to time as Husserl’s transcendental ego with respect to the empirical self. McTaggart’s celebrated refutation of the reality of time is reinterpreted accordingly. To express this argument, one no longer needs to use the notions of ‘change’ or ‘time flow’, but only to point out the in-principle impossibility to refer to the ‘actual now’