Michael Tooley presents a major new philosophical study of time and its relation to causation. The nature of time has always been one of the most fascinating and perplexing problems of philosophy; it has in recent years become the focus of vigorous debate between advocates of rival theories.The traditional, `tensed' accounts of time which hold that time has a direction and that the flow of time is part of the nature of the universe have been challenged by `tenseless' accounts of time, according to which past, present, and future are merely subjective features of experience, rather thanobjective features of events. Time, Tense and Causation offers a new approach, in many ways intermediate between these two rivals. Tooley shares with tensed approaches the views that the universe if dynamic, and that the past and present are real while the future is not; but he rejects the viewthat this points to the existence of irreducible tensed facts. Tooley's approach accounts for time in terms of its relation to causation; he argues that the direction of time is based upon the direction of causation, and that the key to understanding the dynamic nature of the universe is tounderstand the nature of causation. He analyses tensed concepts, and discusses semantic issues about truth and time, Finally, addressing the formidable difficulties posed for tensed accounts of time by the Special Theory of Relativity, he suggests that a modified version of the theory, compatiblewith the account of time in this book, is to be preferred to the standard version. Time, Tense, and Causation is rich in sophisticated and stimulating discussions of many of the deepest problems of metaphysics. It will be essentail reading for anyone specialising in this area of philosophy.

The Philosophy of Time Society grew out of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on the Philosophy of Time offered by George Schlesinger in 1991. The members of that seminar wanted to promote interest in the philosophy of time and Jon N. Turgerson offered to become the first Director of the society with the initial costs underwritten by the Drake University Center for the Humanities. Thus, the Philosophy of Time Society (PTS) was formed in 1993. Its goal is to promote the study of the philosophy of time from a broad analytic perspective, and to provide a forum as an affiliated group with the American Philosophical Association, to discuss the issues in and related to the philosophy of time. The society held its first meeting during the Eastern Division of the AP A in Atlanta, George, in December 1993. In 1997 I began my tenure as Executive Director of PTS and with my term ending in 2000, I decided to put together a volume of selected papers read at PTS meetings over the years. The result is the present volume. It contains some of the latest developments in the field, including discussions of recent books by Michael Tooley, Time, Tense, and Causation, and D. H. Mellor, Real Time II, and much more. The main issue in the philosophy of time is and remains the status of temporal becoming and the passage of time.

Among the many branches of philosophy, the philosophy of time and the philosophy of language are more intimately interconnected than most, yet their practitioners have long pursued independent paths. This book helps to bridge the gap between the two groups. As it makes clear, it is increasingly difficult to do philosophy of language without any metaphysical commitments as to the nature of time, and it is equally difficult to resolve the metaphysical question of whether time is tensed or tenseless independently of the philosophy of language. Indeed, one is tempted to see philosophy of language and metaphysics as a continuum with no sharp boundary. The essays, which were written expressly for this book by leading philosophers of language and philosophers of time, discuss the philosophy of language and its implications for the philosophy of time and vice versa. The intention is not only to further dialogue between philosophers of language and of time but also to present new theories to advance the state of knowledge in the two fields. The essays are organized in two sections—one on the philosophy of tensed language, the other on the metaphysics of time.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Ryan Wasserman explores a range of fascinating puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture, and he draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology.

The Images of Time presents a philosophical investigation of the nature of time and the mind's ways of representing it. Robin Le Poidevin examines how we perceive time and change, the means by which memory links us with the past, the attempt to represent change and movement in art, and the nature of fictional time. These apparently disparate questions all concern the ways in which we represent aspects of time, in thought, experience, art and fiction. They also raisefundamental problems for our philosophical understanding, both of mental representation, and of the nature of time itself.Le Poidevin brings together issues in philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, and literary theory in examining the mechanisms underlying our representation of time in various media, and brings these to bear on metaphysical debates over the real nature of time. These debates concern which aspects of time are genuinely part of time's intrinsic nature, and which, in some sense, are mind-dependent.Arguably, the most important debate concerns time's passage: does time pass in reality, or is the division of events into past, present, and future simply a reflection of our temporal perspective - a result of the interaction between a 'static' world and minds capable of representing it? Le Poidevin argues that, contrary to what perception and memory lead us to suppose, time does not really pass, and this surprising conclusion can be reconciled with the characteristic features of temporalexperience.

The only book to investigate the parallel between what happens at other times and what happens in other possible worlds.