Space-Like Time: Consequences of, Alternatives to, and Arguments Regarding the Theory That Time Is Like Space

Evan Simpson is a philosophy professor and dean of humanities at
McMaster University, and the editor of Anti-foundationalism and
Practical Reasoning: Conversations Between Hermeneutics and Analysis.

Time is one of the perennial philosophical enigmas. Everyone understands
it until trying to explain what it is. The most important accounts—and
those that form the primary object of inquiry in this book—view time
as being like space. Christensen examines them carefully, indeed fussily
and fastidiously, using tools ranging from conceptual analysis to
physical theories of space and time. He declines to declare a conclusion
on the central question, although he suggests strongly that the thesis
that time is space-like has too many flaws to be acceptable. It implies,
for example, that in spite of the distinctions we try to draw in
speaking of events as past, present, or future, “all the events of
time exist ... World War II is occurring ... and a certain reading of
Christensen’s book is occurring, and so on ...” Hence, there is no
such thing as the passage of time.

This may only show that ordinary distinctions are misleading, being
revealed by philosophical inquiry for the convenient fictions they are.
One expression of this view is that pastness, presentness, and futurity
are “merely subjective.” However, Christensen is not attracted by
this idea, which indicates his basic reservation about the thesis of
space-like time. If he is right, it “makes science impossible.” One
interesting implication is that since relativity physics appears to
require this thesis, the philosophical investigation throws Einstein’s
major theories into doubt in spite of their experimental successes.

Christensen’s dense study treats many issues, including competing
views of the grammar of temporal expressions, the asymmetry of time, the
nature of inertia, and Minkowski’s interpretation of the Social Theory
of Relativity. The index is not particularly useful in navigating within
this network of interrelated theoretical problems, and the two-page
bibliography is remarkably short for a wide-ranging book from a
university press. This is a work for specialists.