On Moving Past the ABCs

Abstract Craig Callender’s What Makes Time Special? (OUP 2017) advocates and practices an innovative, thoroughly interdisciplinary approach to philosophical questions about time and temporal features of our lives. Grappling with it is of intrinsic philosophical interest; it is also part of responding to the methodological invitation the book issues to philosophers of time. This paper is motivated by the wish to clarify WMTS’s philosophical underpinnings. The main claim of the paper is that WMTS relies on an ambiguity between rejecting the A-theory versus B-theory debate, and endorsing a position within that debate. This ambiguity leads to a somewhat unstable position on how a key feature of manifest time, namely our sense of time as flowing, arises from physical time. The paper ends with a suggestion for how to resolve the ambiguity, in a way that is in line with the gist of Callender’s overall vision for the field.