There ’ s no time like the Present Tim Button

No-futurists (‘growing block theorists’) hold that that the past and the present are real, but that the future is not. The present moment is therefore privileged: it is the last moment of time. Craig Bourne (2002) and David Braddon-Mitchell (2004) have argued that this position is unmotivated, since the privilege of presentness comes apart from the indexicality of ’this moment’. I respond that no-futurists should treat ‘x is real-as-of y’ as a nonsymmetric relation. Then different moments are real-as-of different times. This reunites privilege with indexicality, but entails that no-futurists must believe in ineliminably tensed facts. No-futurists believe that the past and the present are real, but that the future is not (see e.g. Tooley 1997). No-futurists therefore believe that the present moment is privileged in being the last moment of time. Branching-futurists believe something similar: they hold that the past and the present are linear and actual, but that the future consists of branching possibilities (see e.g. McCall 1984). Branchingfuturists therefore believe that the present moment is privileged in being the last actual moment of time. In this paper I only discuss no-futurism, but everything I say can be said about branching-futurism with only minimal alteration. There are two possible readings of ‘the present’. On the first, ‘the present’ is a mere indexical which refers to the moment simultaneous with the token of ‘the present’.1 On the second, ‘the present’ is a technical term which denotes time’s privileged (i.e. last) moment, whenever that might be.2 To avoid confusion, I write ‘this moment’ for the indexical sense of ‘the present’, and I write ‘the present moment’ for the privileged sense. That is, ‘present’ is a predicate applied to moments or events to indicate that they are privileged. (Similarly for ‘past’ and ‘future’.) In this terminology, no-futurists claim that this moment is present. Iaim to defend this claim against a challenge raised by Bourne (2002) and Braddon-Mitchell (2004). In doing so I shall argue, contrary to most no-futurists, that tense is indispensable to no-futurism. 1 The present problem Bourne (2002: 360) and Braddon-Mitchell (2004: 200) pose the question: What Bourne calls ‘the present’ and Forrest calls ‘now i’. What Bourne calls ‘*present*’ and Forrest calls ‘now b’.