ABSTRACT
In an oft-quoted passage, St. Augustine remarks, “So what is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know.” We know time experientially. There is probably no more fundamental or constant aspect of our experience than our sense of time and its passage. Knowing it experientially is one thing. Understanding it is another. Time slips away, and the future has yet to come. So it is natural
to think that there is, quite literally, nothing but the present. But the present is so incredibly “thin” that it seems hardly big enough to contain all the richness of thought and experience and activity that occupies our minds and lives at any given moment. Could it really be that all there ever is to a high-school prom, or a college football game, or a bloody war is the thinnest slice of instantaneous action? Is there nothing more to time itself than an eternal succession of tiny slivers of temporality? Or are past and future more like distant places that not only exist but are even accessible, if only we had the right technology? The first step toward understanding time is to say something
about the nature of times and about what the terms “past,” “present,” and “future” refer to. The next step is to look at what reasons we might have for and against the claim that past and future times (or, as I shall prefer to put it, past and future objects and
events) do not exist. Discussing this question will, in turn, raise questions about the passage of time. What, exactly, does it mean to say that time passes? Can time pass? Following our discussion of these issues, we shall take up the topic of time travel.
