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Plenty to Come: Making Sense of Correia & Rosenkranz’s Growing Block Cover

Plenty to Come: Making Sense of Correia & Rosenkranz’s Growing Block

By: Natalja Deng  
Open Access
|Apr 2023

Abstract

Fabrice Correia and Sven Rosenkranz’s book Nothing to Come: a Defence of the Growing Block Theory of Time offers an incredibly rich and skillful defense of the growing block theory (GBT), a view of time that arguably has much intuitive appeal, and which has been under attack from many sides. Nonetheless, I have to report that the book’s tense-logical course of treatment has not worked for me; I still struggle with making sense of the GBT. This article begins by drawing out some implications of the book’s set up. First, the notion of existence in play here is not interpretable on the basis of ordinary usage. Second, it would be a mistake to take the tense-logical framework to have any metaphysical significance. I then articulate two main worries about their version of the GBT. The first worry takes a familiar shape: it is just hard to see how their view is dynamic in the relevant sense. The second worry is that the topic seems to have been changed. C&R’s logical system helps itself to key notions whose intended interpretation includes a solution to every metaphysical puzzle about the GBT, so that these puzzles are not so much addressed as enshrined in a formal system. That is, their view seems to answer the question of how language should behave, if the GBT were (somehow) true.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/disp-2021-0019 | Journal eISSN: 2182-2875 | Journal ISSN: 0873-626X
Language: English, Portuguese
Page range: 363 - 372
Published on: Apr 26, 2023
Published by: University of Lisbon
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 4 issues per year

© 2023 Natalja Deng, published by University of Lisbon
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.