ABSTRACT
What sort of things are times? I take it to be uncontroversial that there are times to begin with. Times are whatever serves as the referents of ordinary dates, such as ‘16 June 1995’ or the slightly more sophisticated temporal coordinates used in scientific theories. To deny the existence of times altogether would be to reject a great number of our ordinary and scientific beliefs as either false or meaningless, and that is too high a price to pay for any metaphysical theory. So the interesting question is what times are like, not whether there are any.
