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The B-theory of time, also called the "tenseless theory of time", is one of two positions regarding the temporal ordering of events in the philosophy of time.B-theorists argue that the flow of time is only a subjective illusion of human consciousness, that the past, present, and future are equally real, and that time is tenseless: temporal becoming is not an objective feature of reality.
In the first mode, events are ordered as future, present, and past.Futurity and pastness allow of degrees, while the present does not. When we speak of time in this way, we are speaking in terms of a series of positions which run from the remote past through the recent past to the present, and from the present through the near future all the way to the remote future.
This conception of an individual as always present is opposed to perdurantism or four-dimensionalism, which maintains that an object is a series of temporal parts or stages, requiring a B-theory of time. The use of "endure" and "perdure" to distinguish two ways in which an object can be thought to persist can be traced to David Lewis.
Examples in continental philosophy of philosophers raising questions of temporality include Edmund Husserl's analysis of internal time consciousness, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, J. M. E. McTaggart's article "The Unreality of Time", George Herbert Mead's Philosophy of the Present, and Jacques Derrida's criticisms of Husserl's analysis.
The theory resolves the paradox that time has a beginning but does not seem to have an end. There are also other reasons for supporting the growing block view of time that go beyond the common-sense. For example, Tooley bases his argument on the causal relation. His main argument as outlined by Dainton is as follows: [2]
There is a grain of truth in this, but there is more to the C-series than this. Stripping the temporal features from the B-series only gives what the C- and B-series have minimally in common, notably the constituents of the series and the formal characteristics of being linear, asymmetric, and transitive. However, the C-series has features that ...
Perdurantism or perdurance theory is a philosophical theory of persistence and identity. [1] The debate over persistence currently involves three competing theories—one three-dimensionalist theory called "endurantism" and two four-dimensionalist theories called "perdurantism" and "exdurantism".
However, instead of identifying the persisting object as the entire set or sum of its temporal parts, the exdurantist argues that any object under discussion is a single stage (time-slice, temporal part, etc.), and that the other stages or parts that comprise the persisting object are related to that part by a "temporal counterpart" relation.