Daily Dialectic

In “Time’s Ontic Voltage” (2011), Craig Callender suggests that contemporary (analytic) philosophy of time suffers from an unhealthy fixation on existence — indeed the debate dominating the field is between presentism, eternalism, and possibilism, which are metaphysical models exclusively concerned with whether past and/or future events exist—and is in need of therapy. He offers a 3-step programme to cure this “existence mania”. While I admit that there is a problem (the 0th step towards recovery), I argue that the problem lies with the particular models and not with questions about existence in general. I shall illustrate this claim with specifics from an analogous debate in the philosophy of physics concerning the non-existence of time itself.