ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of various attempts to make sense of tense. Tense is problematic in its own right. It's just that McTaggart's argument has been a red herring that has served to distract defenders of the A view in their attempt to develop a sensible tensed ontology. The allure of hybrid views is that they supposedly provide an account of tense that is true to the way we unreflectively conceptualise time in accordance with McTaggart's phenomenological analysis and is therefore also true to tense logic. The moving spotlight theory contains no positive account of the nature of tense, which at one and the same time makes it vague but also spares it from the kind of criticism a more elaborate theory would receive. Cameron contrasts his view with what is called Lucretian presentism, which explains the truth of expressions about the past by postulating of present entities so-called past-oriented properties.
