ABSTRACT
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 richness of thought and experience and activity that occupies our minds and lives at any given moment. Some philosophers believe that there are no merely past or merely future things. They endorse presentism, the view that it always has been and always will be the case that whatever exists presently exists. Four-dimensionalism is currently the majority view among those writing in the field, in no small part because it is view that many think fits best with people's most successful theories in physics. Reflection on apparent experience of temporal passage provides one of the primary motivations for rejecting a “static” eternalist theory of time in favor of “dynamic” rival theories, such as presentism and the growing block theory.
