ANTIREALISM AND TIME: AN ESSAY IN METHOD AND METAPHYSICS

The first chapter of this thesis is preoccupied with the question of the metaphysical method. In particular, I argue for a broad antirealist approach to metaphysics that rejects the ‘unique true theory’ claim of metaphysical realism. I show that only this broad metaphysical antirealism can avoid the problems of progress and underdetermination that plague the realist project. As a result, I show that we should reject the notion of truth and falsity in metaphysics, and instead opt for metaphysical theories that capture the understanding of each philosopher provided that such theories have explanatory power and are internally consistent. Then, the way to choose between several candidate theories would be by appealing to theoretical virtues that ground aesthetic beauty which of course vary according to taste. Accordingly, in the second chapter, I provide arguments that appeal to two such virtues (simplicity and utility) to argue for holistic antirealism, the thesis that a property exists mind-independently but cannot be conceptualized without reference to experience. Holistic antirealism is then used to show how we can use our perceptual experience of local presentness to derive global presentness and therefore overcome the argument from special relativity against the global present. In the third chapter, I show that we must rely on perceptual experience to infer the dynamicity of time. Afterwards, I argue that to account for this dynamicity in terms of the world as we perceive it we need an ontology of the world that includes objects and events and where time is the attraction and repulsion between events and objects that participate in them. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I argue that perceptual experience is the source of our belief in the asymmetry between the openness of the future and the fixity of the past. As a final synthesis, I combine the holistic antirealism from Chapter Two and the object-event ontology from Chapter Three to give an account that characterizes the indeterminacy of the future and the determinacy of the past.