¹ Shoemaker, Sydney, ‘Time without Change’, Identity, Cause, and Mind, expanded edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 49–56Google Scholar. See Corish, Denis, ‘Could Time be Change?’ Philosophy 84 (2009), 219–232CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I argue there that Shoemaker's attempt to show the possibility of a time without change begs the question by assuming that time passes in a region without change because it passes in a distant region with change, which distant region has, apart from observation, no effect on the changeless region. In effect, Shoemaker assumes absolute time, which is time without change.

² Corish, op. cit. passim.

³ Corish, op. cit. 229–230.

⁴ For a general account of the two opposing schools see Gale, Richard M., The Language of Time (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), 3–33Google Scholar. There has been some refinement since, particularly as regards the translation of the language of the one school into that of the other, and with some interesting discussion of truth conditions for tensed sentences – see, for example, Oaklander, L. Nathan and Smith, Quentin (eds.), The New Theory of Time (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994)Google Scholar and Mellor, D. H., Real Time II (London and New York: Routledge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and there is now also a four-volume collection edited by Oaklander, , The Philosophy of Time (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁵ For example, in the four volume The Philosophy of Time, edited by Oaklander, the first volume is pretty well all based on McTaggart's distinction, as are many articles in the remaining volumes.

⁶ See, for example, Mellor, op. cit. 72–83.

⁷ See, for example, Gale, op. cit. note 1, 88, also Geach, P. T., Truth, Love, and Immortality (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 90Google Scholar.

⁸ Gale, op. cit. 100. See 86–100.

⁹ Le Poidevin, Robin and MacBeath, Murray (eds.), The Philosophy of Time (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 6Google Scholar. It seems to have been expressions such as ‘more past than’ which made Gale think of circularity in such attempts.

¹⁰ For an account of such a series see, for example, Huntington, E. V., The Continuum and Other Types of Serial Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917)Google Scholar. An example of a simply ordered class in such a relation is, according to Huntington (16), ‘The class of all instants of time, arranged in order of priority.’

¹¹ It should be remarked here that this is not gainsaid by a quite meaningful expression which McTaggart uses, and which we shall have to refer to again: ‘an event, which is now present, was future and will be past’. This does not indicate in any way that the future is earlier or the past later. What it does indicate is that some event at an earlier time was future and at a later time will be past. The primary temporal reference is indicated by the verb. To take ‘was’ as the example, it says that in the past, the earlier time, this event was still future or later.

¹² Except in a relative sense. ‘Earlier than’ seems to be equivalent to ‘past with regard to or in relation to’, ‘later than’ to ‘future with regard to’.

¹³ For an account of time as change itself see my ‘Could Time be Change?’ 223–232.

¹⁴ McTaggart, op. cit. 458.

¹⁵ In my view this precludes time travel to the past.

¹⁶ It may also be said here, with reference to note 12 above, that to insist that there is no such thing as past or future with regard to but only past or future simply is to appeal to the individual as opposed to the general sense of those terms.

¹⁷ McTaggart, op. cit. 458.

¹⁸ Mellor, op. cit. 13.

¹⁹ Even Michael Tooley, who wishes in some sense to bridge the gap between the rival views with ‘a third way’, based on causation, accepts that there are two rival views and maintains that ‘tenseless concepts and facts are more basic than tensed ones’ – Tooley, Michael, Time, Tense, and Causation (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 29, 380–381Google Scholar.

²⁰ Corish, Denis, ‘McTaggart's Argument’, Philosophy 80 (2005), 79–80Google Scholar. Similarly, as I pointed out in the same paper (90), the two statements from which McTaggart would like to get a contradiction, ‘Past, present and future are incompatible determinations’ and ‘But every event has them all’ can in fact be true together. Here we see that as individuals related to each other past, present and future are incompatible, but as individuals that change their classes, present becoming past, future becoming present, they are not.

²¹ So ‘Detroit is between New York and Chicago’ is given as an example of a triadic relation in Copi, Irving M., Symbolic Logic Fifth Edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1979), 117Google Scholar, even though the directional relation between New York and Detroit is (roughly) the same as that between Detroit and Chicago, so that that relation, a dyadic one, is repeated: as New York is east of Detroit so Detroit is east of Chicago.

²² This also suggests – something I merely mention here – the interesting possibility that tensed language, corresponding to an individual past and future related to the individual present of the use of such language, concerns individual times as opposed to classes of them, and that tenseless language, concerned with classes and the terms ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ has abstracted from such individual reference. So ‘Dinosaurs did exist but do not’ but ‘Dinosaurs are animals’. In the latter statement we have simply abstracted from the particular temporal circumstances of dinosaurs. What we have is Aristotelian abstraction, whether rightly or wrongly posited, a situation of logic, not Platonic timeless entities, whether rightly or wrongly posited, a situation of ontology. It appears that we are often tempted to drift into a Platonic ontology of idealized ‘real’ entities where Aristotelian logic, based on the generalization of abstraction from individual real entities, would suffice.

²³ We could, as I pointed out in ‘McTaggart's Argument’, 84–85 – something which again points to the dyadic nature of past-present-future – contrive an artificial but perfectly logical similar three-term arrangement in the other dyadic series, by introducing something like the impermanence that is natural in time. So, for example, in number, if we envisage that each successive number in turn, running in the same direction, from, say, smaller to greater, has some property like that of time t at time t as a replacement – call it, whatever it is, ‘numerus’, or by any other arbitrary but constant name – then we have greater-than-numerus (which in turn becomes numerus), numerus, and less-than-numerus (which becomes in order less and less than numerus), a three-term situation in number exactly similar to past, present and future in time. And similarly, mutatis mutandis, for space and the more general precedes-succeeds. The situation is artificial for these other dyadic series, but the mere logical possibility, based on replacement and the repetition of the dyadic relation, of smaller-greater, left-right, say, and precedes-succeeds, is telling.

²⁴ Aristotle, Physics II. 2. 193b31–35.

²⁵ This, with regard to McTaggart, and with some extended reference to others, I have tried to do in ‘McTaggart's Argument’.

²⁶ What the ontology may be that permits or requires such a logic I have tried to indicate in Corish, Denis, ‘Time Reconsidered’, Philosophy 81 (2006), 81–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ It involves, I believe, a developed account of time as relative, in the sense disputed in The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence – and which may be consistent with relativity theory – of which I tried to give an outline in a much earlier paper: Corish, , ‘The Continuum’, The Review of Metaphysics XXII (1969), 523–546Google Scholar. Also in Corish, , ‘Time, Space and Freewill: The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence’, The Study of Time III, edited by Fraser, J. T., Lawrence, N., Park, D. (New York, Heidelberg, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1978), 634–657CrossRefGoogle Scholar, I give some consideration to why Leibniz himself did not produce such a developed, or even adequate, account.

²⁸ I am extremely grateful to Anthony O'Hear for impressing upon me the necessity for giving an initial account of ‘earlier and later’ at the very beginning of this paper, as well as, in general, for being willing to look at arguments that were not dictated by the adherence to this or that established school, so allowing for a reasoned consideration of hitherto unexplored positions.