Bahadir Eker

Time and Temporality in Perspective explores central topics in the contemporary analytic metaphysics of time such as the passage of time, the reality of tense, temporal ontology and persistence. The first part of the book is a sustained critique of traditional approaches to realism about tense, presenting two novel arguments that seek to demonstrate why they are misguided. The second part of the book develops an alternative approach described as a perspectivalism about temporal reality. According to this view, reality possesses a fundamental temporally perspectival structure that explains why it objectively divides into distinct past, present, and future compartments and illuminates the sense in which this compartmentalization is dynamic. The book examines how the debates over temporal ontology and persistence can be understood within the perspectivalist framework and defends a non-standard version of presentism. Time and Temporality in Perspective is essential reading for all scholars, researchers and advanced students of metaphysics and especially the philosophy of time.

Kendall Walton has (in)famously argued that photographs fundamentally differ from handmade pictures such as paintings and drawings in a crucial respect: unlike the latter, photographs are transparent in that looking at them allows one to literally see the objects they depict. Walton’s explanation for this alleged contrast appeals to the different ways in which the depictive content of a photograph and that of a handmade picture counterfactually depend on the depicted scene, and to the similarity between the dependence profiles of photographs and experiences of seeing an object. I argue that, even if photographs are indeed transparent and handmade pictures are not, it is a mistake to think that what grounds the transparency of the former and the non-transparency of the latter concerns the counterfactual dependence profiles of these different pictorial kinds. The dissimilarity between the dependence profiles of photographs and handmade pictures stems from some merely accidental features of certain types of cameras. Further, the dependence profiles of photography and ordinary object-seeing are not at all analogous in the way Walton supposes. Thus, even those who are convinced by photographic transparency need an alternative account of it.

It is a truism that things undergo qualitative change. All traditional accounts of what qualitative change consists in involve some form of temporal qualification, even though it is a matter of controversy which elements of reality are supposed to be affected by it and how deep it runs. This paper examines an alternative approach that is opposed to temporal qualification across the board: hyper-atemporalism. It has been argued recently that hyper-atemporalism, when combined with a fragmentalist metaphysics of temporal reality, delivers the most robust account of genuine qualitative change. This paper argues in response that a view of this kind not only fails in this regard but actually renders qualitative change impossible.

ABSTRACT Aesthetic autonomism is standardly defined as the view that the aesthetic value of an artwork in no way depends on its moral value, and hence that considerations about the latter are irrelevant to aesthetic evaluation. However, it has recently been argued that definitions along these lines involve certain flaws and that autonomism should be characterized instead as the view that it is rationally permissible not to adjust one’s initial aesthetic judgment about a work in light of how one evaluates it morally. This paper argues that this proposal is seriously misguided in three central respects: its focus on evaluative adjustments is objectionably narrow and ignores other forms of evaluative conduct; its appeal to rationality misconstrues the core commitments of non-autonomists; and its permissivist character results in a distortion of what is at stake in the debate about the autonomy of the aesthetic.

Realists about tense, or A-theorists of time, believe that some of the facts that fundamentally constitute reality are tensed, and most of them seem to think that those tensed facts are to be understood as fixing the way things are, absolutely speaking, or simpliciter. But there is a simple yet powerful argument, the argument from atemporality, to the effect that realists should reject the absolutist conception of reality’s constitution by facts because, despite appearances to the contrary, that conception is in fact inconsistent with realism about tense. After presenting the argument, I investigate why the relevant inconsistency has not been recognised so far and point to one possible explanation.

It is usually agreed that reality is temporal in the sense of containing entities that exist in time, but some philosophers, roughly those who have been traditionally called A-theorists, hold that reality is temporal in a far more profound sense than what is implied by the mere existence of such entities. This hypothesis of deep temporality typically involves two ideas: that reality is temporally compartmentalised into distinct present, past, and future ‘realms’, and that this compartmentalisation is temporally dynamic in the sense that the boundaries of those temporal realms change from one moment to the next. The truth of something like this hypothesis is commonly thought to require that at least some of the facts that fundamentally constitute reality be tensed. While this seems plausible, realism about fundamental tensed facts does not seem to entail deep temporality. Nor is it clear exactly what realism about tense amounts to, given that no informative answer has been given to the question of what it is for a fact to be tensed. In this paper, I introduce a novel approach, perspectivalism about temporal reality, that seeks to vindicate the hypothesis of deep temporality by ascribing to reality a certain kind of temporally perspectival structure, which also provides a straightforward answer to the question of what the tensedness of facts consists in as well as to the question of what it is for reality to be constituted by such facts.

It has been argued recently that one major difficulty facing the A-theory of time consists in the view’s failure to provide a satisfactory account of the passage of time. Critics have objected that this particular charge is premised on an unduly strong conception of temporal passage, and that the argument does not go through on alternative, less demanding conceptions of passage. The resulting dialectical stalemate threatens to prove intractable, given the notorious elusiveness of the notion of temporal passage. Here I argue that there is progress to be made in this regard. The argument from passage takes issue with a certain feature of the standard versions of the A-theory that is in fact problematic independently of worries about temporal passage. To illustrate this, I present a new argument, the argument from comprehensiveness, which demonstrates that the standard A-theoretic account of temporal reality is inadequate, even if it is granted that it can accommodate passage.

According to Fine’s famous take on the infamous McTaggartian paradox, realism about tensed facts is incompatible with the joint acceptence of three very general and seemingly plausible theses about reality. However, Correia and Rosenkranz have recently objected that Fine’s argument depends on a crucial assumption about the nature of tensed facts; once that assumption is given up, they claim, realists can endorse the theses in question without further ado. They also argue that their novel version of tense realism, called dynamic absolutism, is to be preferred over its rivals. I argue in this paper that dynamic absolutism does not constitute a genuine alternative for realists about tense.

In his stimulating recent book Reasons without Persons, Brian Hedden develops a novel theory of rationality that he calls Time-Slice Rationality. One of the main theses of TSR is that all rational requirements are synchronic. We argue here first that this thesis is not well-motivated. We also demonstrate that Hedden is in fact committed to an even stronger claim about the rationality of an agent at a time. Finally, we provide some arguments against the conception of rationality that results from this stronger claim.

Evaluativism about desire, the view that desires just are, or necessarily involve, positive evaluations of their objects, currently enjoys widespread popularity in many philosophical circles. This chapter argues that evaluativism, in both of its doxastic and perceptual versions, overstates and mischaracterises the connection between desires and evaluations. Whereas doxastic evaluativism implausibly rules out cases where someone has a desire, despite evaluating its object negatively, being uncertain about its value, or having no doxastic attitude whatsoever towards its evaluative status at all, perceptual evaluativism cannot even properly apply to the large class of standing desires. It is also argued that evaluativism about desire is not even well-motivated in the first place: the theory is supposed to solve a particular puzzle about the role desires play in the explanation of action, yet, in fact, it does not offer any help whatsoever in dealing with the relevant puzzle.