Three philosophical points about time

Abstract

There are three points about time and the way it usually is discussed today that have, in my opinion, an outstanding philosophical significance. The first is whether time has to be thought of as something uniform and isotropic, or there can be an essential difference between past and future; the second is whether it can be seen as a set of instants and, more generally, whether continua can be seen as point sets (where “point” has a very general meaning I will explain presently); the third is whether all we need to describe temporal events are instantaneous snapshots, or something else, not reducible to such snapshots, is also indispensable. Each section of the present work is devoted to a discussion of one of these topics.