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The Causal Efficiency of the Passage of Time

Benovsky, Jiri

In: Philosophia, 2012, vol. 40, no. 4, p. 763-769

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    Title
    • The Causal Efficiency of the Passage of Time
    Author
    • Benovsky, Jiri. Department of Philosophy, The University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland
    Document Type
    • Postprint
    OAI-PMH Identifier
    • oai:doc.rero.ch:320977
    Summary
    Does mere passage of time have causal powers? Are properties like "being n days past” causally efficient? A pervasive intuition among metaphysicians seems to be that they don't. Events and/or objects change, and they cause or are caused by other events and/or objects; but one does not see how just the mere passage of time could cause any difference in the world. In this paper, I shall discuss a case where it seems that mere passage of time does have causal powers: Sydney Shoemaker's (1969) possible world where temporal vacua (allegedly) take place. I shall argue that Shoemaker's thought-experiment doesn't really aim at teaching us that there can be time without change, but rather that if such a scenario is plausible at all (as I think it is) it provides us with good reasons to think that mere passage of time can be directly causally efficient