The doubt is similar to the one we saw concerning motion. Just as a motion unfolds across time and so is never entirely present, so does temporal duration seem to lie outside what presently exists. After all, the past is already gone, the future is yet to come, and the present moment has no duration of any magnitude but is an undivided instant. We often compare temporal duration to spatial magnitude, talking about a “long” or “short” time the way we might talk about a long or short distance. But actually space is very different from time: the distance between pitcher’s mound and home plate is
...more
