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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.
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".
Perdurantism—or perdurance theory—is a closely related philosophical theory of persistence and identity, [4] according to which an individual has distinct temporal parts throughout its existence, and the persisting object is the sum or set of all of its temporal parts.
In philosophy, temporality refers to the idea of a linear progression of past, present, and future. The term is frequently used, however, in the context of critiques of commonly held ideas of linear time.
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 ...
Critics of this theory such as Myles Brand have suggested that the theory be modified so that an event had a spatiotemporal region; consider the event of a flash of lightning. The idea is that an event must include both the span of time of the flash of lightning and the area in which it occurred.
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.