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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.
In the metaphysics of time, an important contrast is between the A-series and the B-series. According to the A-series theory, the flow of time is real, meaning that events are categorized into the past, present, and future. The present continually moves forward in time and events that are in the present now will eventually change their status ...
Plato, in the Timaeus, identified time with the period of motion of the heavenly bodies, and space as that in which things come to be. Aristotle, in Book IV of his Physics, defined time as the number of changes with respect to before and after, and the place of an object as the innermost motionless boundary of that which surrounds it.
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.
As time passes, the moment that was once the present becomes part of the past, and part of the future, in turn, becomes the new present. In this way time is said to pass, with a distinct present moment moving forward into the future and leaving the past behind. One view of this type, presentism, argues that only the present exists. The present ...
In contemporary metaphysics, temporal parts are the parts of an object that exist in time. A temporal part would be something like "the first year of a person's life", or "all of a table from between 10:00 a.m. on June 21, 1994 to 11:00 p.m. on July 23, 1996".
It is a fusion of all the perdurant's instantaneous time slices compiled and blended into a complete mereological whole. Perdurantism posits that temporal parts alone are what ultimately change. Katherine Hawley in How Things Persist states that change is "the possession of different properties by different temporal parts of an object".
Temporal finitism is the doctrine that time is finite in the past. [clarification needed] The philosophy of Aristotle, expressed in such works as his Physics, held that although space was finite, with only void existing beyond the outermost sphere of the heavens, time was infinite.