Time: A-theory or B-theory?
Oh come one... at least word length labels give me a chance at guessing which philosophical position resolves to sane. A and B give me almost nothing!
The A-theory is identified with the view that "becoming" is somehow fundamental to the nature of the universe, and that it's not just an illusion created by, say, our only having memories of times t < t0 at time t0. A-theorists hold that, in some ultimate sense, points in time change their ontological status as they transition from the future, to the present, and into the past. To say "The event E will happen in the future" is not just to say that the time of E's occurrence has a larger coordinate than the time of the utterance. It is just to say that E will happen in the future, full stop. The process of becoming that is the universe just hasn't gotten to E yet. As this process of becoming unfolds, the truth-value of the statement will change.
At least, those are the kinds of things that A-theorists say. I have a heard time of making sense of it beyond its being a denial of the B-theory.
B-theorists subscribe to the "block-universe" view of time. All points in time have the same ontological status. All statements about the timing of events are really relative statements, perhaps about the relative timing of the statement's utterance and some event. Properly understood, the truth values of these statements are the same at all points of time. There is no becoming; this is an illusion, created perhaps by the physical state that our brains have at different points in time.
The questions are at http://philpapers.org/surveys/oquestions.html. The correlations can be intensely interesting to those who understand philosophical jargon (http://philpapers.org/surveys/linear_most.pl) - it doesn't take too long to look them up as you go - and I actually found it to be a fun way to learn new philosophy. I know that there was a LW thread about this several months ago, but it didn't have a section for people here to respond to the survey. I would be very interested to see how people here would respond.
I'll repost the questions here:
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Original Survey Questions | PhilPapers Surveys
A priori knowledge: yes or no?
Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?
Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?
Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?
Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?
External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?
Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?
God: theism or atheism?
Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?
Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?
Logic: classical or non-classical?
Mental content: internalism or externalism?
Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?
Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?
Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?
Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism?
Moral motivation: internalism or externalism?
Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes?
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?
Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?
Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?
Proper names: Fregean or Millian?
Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?
Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?
Time: A-theory or B-theory?
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don't switch?
Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?
Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?
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And... which of the following philosophers do you identify with?
The philosophers available to choose from for the "which philosophers do you identify with?" question were:
Anscombe
Aquinas
Aristotle
Augustine
Berkeley
Carnap
Davidson
Descartes
Frege
Hegel
Heidegger
Hobbes
Hume
Husserl
Kant
Kierkegaard
Leibniz
Lewis
Locke
Marx
Mill
Moore
Nietzsche
Plato
Quine
Rawls
Rousseau
Russell
Socrates
Spinoza
Wittgenstein