Jaarboek Thomas Instituut 1997 - Thomas Instituut te Utrecht

120 ANTONIE VOS
describe and to analyze this universe of thought structurally. A
structural description is a necessary condition of a systematic analysis.
Here reading and analyzing Goris's dissertation present a formidable
task, because the author continually wavers between the intuitive and
systematic type of exposition.
First we have to notice that the distinction between A and B
as different types of theories of time and different kinds of concepts of
time is not based on a logical foundation. McTaggert distinguished
between two different temporal aspects which have to taken into
account: the relations between past, present and juture on the one
hand and the comparative relation of being earlier/later than. The
theoretical Sitz im leben of this distinction is his idealist ontology of
time: Time is not real. Here we are far away from Thomas Aquinas'
theory of time and Dr. Goris's characterizations of it: Time is both
real and necessary. Of course, if time is not real, it cannot be
necessary. So let us once for all disconnect McTaggert, Thomas and
Duns.
4.4 Again the next issues are rather different ones: the course of
events being open and the juture being open are issues which are not
to be identified with the issue of the status of past, present and future.
The logical opposite of a future being open is not that there is not a
future qua future, but that there is considered to be a specific status of
the future: the future being fixed and closed and therefore necessary.
Then the preliminary question is that of the relationship
between ontic modalities and temporal qualifications and concepts.
Being and time are quite different categories in spite of the lofty
tradition of the necessity of time and Sein und Zeit. If essential
characteristics enjoy an identity in their own right, then it is
impossible that the one is consistently reduced to the other. Now ontic
and temporal differences differ substantially from one another and
therefore diachrony and contingency, eternity and necessity have to be
disconnected in the first place and a independent treatment is the
necessary condition for them being adequately compared in the second
place. If we opt for a short-cut, a consistent description is not to be
reached. In this context I note that the meaning of the symbol M on