ABSTRACT
A. N. Prior talks of "branching time" and Swinburne has suggested a temporary bifurcation of time followed by its ultimate reunification. He is talking about different courses of events rather than different courses of time as such, because he feels that time not embodied in events is too tenuous to talk about. Swinburne is denying that it necessarily is. His suggestion gains its plausibility from the contrast between public time and private time. Swinburne protests against massive reduplication praeter necessitatem it is open to us to claim that the undividedness of time constitutes such a necessity Swinburne must provide some features in his account that will enable us to argue, as Hollis does, the non-identity of discernibles. Time is not cyclic. And this topological property follows from an even more fundamental one – that time has a direction.
