Stephen Barker

Time appears to flow. Our experience of change and our own being in time reveals a relentless motion or passage. This apparent time motion is a profound enigma for currently well-known conceptions of time. I argue that they can neither explain it nor explain it away. This book describes a new theory of time that renders temporal passage fully intelligible. It treats time motion seriously by building in motion as a metaphysically fundamental feature of the physical universe, whose principle form is through higher-dimensional space. This motion-first metaphysics then rejects the orthodox view that motion is explained in terms of space and time, but rather uses space and motion to define time. This approach requires rethinking the physicist’s 4D manifold M. The orthodox view is that M is space-time: a vast concrete 4D block locating all things whose 4th-dimension is time. According to the motion-first metaphysics I develop, M is not space-time but instead a pre-physical aspect of a fundamentally dynamic reality. Time is not M’s 4th dimension. Instead time is the ineluctable motion through the 4th-dimension that all persisting things undergo. I argue that my motion-first metaphysics solves puzzles of time, change, and persistence. It’s also consistent with special relativity—time dilation, length contraction, and relativity of simultaneity—although it’s not consistent with the Minkowskian interpretation of M as spacetime.

Are the sculpture and the mass of gold which permanently makes it up one object or two? In this article, we argue that the monist, who answers ‘one object’, cannot accommodate the asymmetry of material constitution. To say ‘the mass of gold materially constitutes the sculpture, whereas the sculpture does not materially constitute the mass of gold’, the monist must treat ‘materially constitutes’ as an Abelardian predicate, whose denotation is sensitive to the linguistic context in which it appears. We motivate this approach in terms of modal analyses of material constitution, but argue that ultimately it fails. The monist must instead accept a deflationary, symmetrical use of ‘materially constitutes’. We argue that this is a serious cost for her approach

In this paper we present a new metaphysical theory of material objects. On our theory, objects are bundles of property instances, where those properties give the nature or essence of that object. We call the theory essential bundle theory. Property possession is not analysed as bundle-membership, as in traditional bundle theories, since accidental properties are not included in the object’s bundle. We have a different story to tell about accidental property possession. This move reaps many benefits. Essential bundle theory delivers a simple theory of the essential properties of material objects; an explanation of how object coincidence can arise; an actual-world ground for modal differences between coincident objects; a simple story about intrinsic properties; and a plausible account of certain ubiquitous cases of causal overdetermination.

Negative facts get a bad press. One reason for this is that it is not clear what negative facts are. We provide a theory of negative facts on which they are no stranger than positive atomic facts. We show that none of the usual arguments hold water against this account. Negative facts exist in the usual sense of existence and conform to an acceptable Eleatic principle. Furthermore, there are good reasons to want them around, including their roles in causation, chance-making and truth-making, and in constituting holes and edges.