Jaarboek Thomas Instituut 1997 - Thomas Instituut te Utrecht

A RESPONSE TO ANTONIE VOS 131
done-with, and in this sense it is temporally necessary. There is no use
in crying over spilt milk or in closing the barn after the horses got
out. The future, on the other hand, seems to be free from this kind of
necessity. Most of us intuitively think that the future is open, is the
realm of genuine possibilities. It is not just a matter that we do not or
cannot know what will happen, but the future is in and out of itself
unfixed and indeterminate. The question is how to reflect
philosophically on this general human intuition that there is this
difference in temporal modality between the past and present on the
one, and the future on the other hand.
If we want to take the intuition seriously, we first have to
take the temporal notions of past, present and future as basic in our
account of time. That is, the monadic; dynamic notions of past,
present and future cannot be reduced to the relational, static notions of
'earlier than', 'simultaneous with' and 'later than'. We have to adopt
some version of what is commonly called nowadays a 'tensed' theory
of time. For the alternative, i.e. some kind of so-called 'tenseless'
theory, doesn't allow in the first place to make a distinction between
past, present and future that is rooted in reality itself and not merely
in our consciousness or in our language."
Next, we have to add a different modal status to past plus
present and to the future. For the acceptance of a tensed view on time
does not imply automatically that past and present are modally
different from the future. Some adherents of the tensed theory do not
accept that the future is temporally contingent in contrast with the past
and present.
Finally, I think that the temporal contingency of the future
does imply that propositions about future events that are logically and
also causally contingent are neither true nor false. In my book I argue
In Free Creatures I often use the expressions A- and B-theory to
refer to these rival views on time. McTaggart coined these expressions. In
contemporary literature on the philosophy of time the names 'tensed' and
'tenseless' are more common. The contrast between the two views has to do
with intuitive ideas about the nature of time itself and is not tied to
McTaggart's idealist philosophy. He just happened to be the first one to make
the contrast explicit. Therefore I don't think that Dr. Vos' objection (see his
point 4.3) is relevant.