The Philosophy of Time is Straightforward (I'm serious)

I thought the nature of time was a vexed issue but it’s totally not

I have been doing a metaphysics unit this semester, the first part of which has focussed on different “theories of time” (we have just finished this part, more or less, though we’re soon to get into theories about the possibility of time travel). Previously, the only contact I had had with the contemporary discussion on the nature of time was the book The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time (2015) by the controversial theoretical physicist Lee Smolin and the political philosopher and Brazilian politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger (yes, you read his credentials right (it seems the only reason he thought it was a good idea to co-write a book on cosmology, physics, mathematics and the nature of time is because (apparently) all his political theorising has emphasised the importance of change and evolution, and he thinks cosmology is (and ought to be understood as) fundamentally a historical science like the social sciences)). Partly because of this book, and the way it presented its arguments as standing entirely apart from the debate in philosophy, and the ‘mysteries’ it appeared to present, I had gone into the unit expecting that I would probably disagree with the framing of the debate in philosophy, rejecting all the major philosophical positions in favour of a robust agnosticism and ‘mysterianism’. I was wrong. Instead, after being exposed to the arguments by my lecturer, David Braddon-Mitchell, one of the leading four-dimensionalists (four-dimensionalism is more or less synonymous with ‘eternalism’ or perhaps ‘pure eternalism’) in contemporary analytic philosophy, I have become a very confident four-dimensionalist, with very little credence in any other alternative (at least I think that the true theory of time is much closer to four-dimensionalism than any of the others). I have also learned from Mr. Braddon-Mitchell that Lee Smolin and Roberto Unger were actually wrong to think that four-dimensionalism is necessarily incompatible with the view that the laws of nature may themselves change, and also wrong to suggest that eternalist-type views can’t account for the fact that the universe has a history. I have realised that the arguments – even leaving aside Einstein – overwhelmingly favour four-dimensionalism. Basically, I would put my view as strongly as the following: presentism is a total joke, and the ‘hybrid’ views all suffer from, well, fatal logical defects (it seems to me that the debate is a true metaphysical debate, in the sense that logic can decide it completely: eternalism is the only coherent theory).

I would present my case for this myself, except that very smart people have been debating these matters for decades, and a rigorous version of my case exists elsewhere (freely available online, in fact). Instead, I will provide three links (the first two of which are links to papers by professors who have taught me (forgive me my parochialism)). I believe these sources suffice to show that four-dimensionalism is absolutely the way to go. I really do think that anyone who’s reviewed the literature should be overwhelmingly confident that the past, present and future all exist equally; that ‘now’ is indexical, directly analogous to ‘here’ except for temporal location instead of spatial location; and that we can talk of events being objectively ‘earlier than’ or ‘later than’ other events in the ‘4-D block’, if the Big Bang is your reference point (earlier events are those closer to the Big Bang on the 4-D block)), but not being objectively 'present,' 'in the past' or 'in the future'. Anyway, here are my links, each accompanied by a brief synopsis:

In this paper [http://www-personal.usyd.edu.au/~njjsmith/papers/SmithInconsistencyAtheory.pdf], Sydney University logic professor and notable degrees-of-truth theorist, N.J.J. Smith argues for a logical inconsistency in the A-theory, amending McTaggart’s famous argument (McTaggart being arguably the originator of modern philosophical inquiry into time with his immensely influential 1908 book The Unreality of Time).

In this very important paper [https://philpapers.org/rec/BRAHDW], David Braddon-Mitchell explains how the ‘growing block’ theory – the most popular of the hybrids – entails that we are almost certainly in the past (a bullet obviously not worth biting).  Judge for yourself.
Finally, here, in this blogpost [http://mediumofexpression.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/rebirthing-pains.html], the excellent Australian, Cambridge-based metaphysician Huw Price (they’re all Australians!) explains why Smolin is wrong to think that the block universe theory (four-dimensionalism, pure eternalism) is incompatible with his theories about quantum mechanics and the evolution of the laws of nature, or that it entails determinism. He also explains why, if you actually start thinking about it, there’s nothing that terrifying about eternalism about time. It’s only if by “intuitions” you mean disordered and sketchy thoughts that you can say “presentism is intuitive”.