ABSTRACT
For the past hundred years or so, the debate between the static and dynamic views has been the central battleground in the philosophy of time. This chapter talks about what the two positions come to and where the disagreement lies. Time’s passage follows from its division into past, present, and future. The static view says that time does not really pass and the tenseless theory says that there is no absolute difference between past, present, and future. Defenders of this position have some explaining to do, because this is not how things appear. They need to explain why time seems to pass. They also need to say why the present seems to differ, as such, from other times, and why the past seems to differ from the future. Dynamists, by contrast, reject both the reducibility of tense and the tenseless theory. They deny that “now” is analogous to “here,” and that tensed statements have tenseless truth conditions.
