M. Joshua Mozersky, “Time, Language, and Ontology: The World from the B-Theoretic Perspective” (Oxford UP, 2015)
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What is the central claim of Mozersky’s eternalist view of time?
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Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Joshua Mazurski, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queen's University in Ontario. His new book Time, Language and Ontology, The World from the Be Theoretic Perspective, is just out from Oxford University Press as part of their series Oxford Studies of Time in Language and Thought.
Is the present time uniquely real or do past and future equally exist? Does the word now simply express someone's current position in time the way the word here simply expresses someone's current position in space? In his new book, Mazerski argues for ontological commitment to past, present, and future alike, and he provides an account of tensed language in which the underlying meaning of was, is, and will be is actually tenseless. He defends his eternalist view by countering arguments for the main alternatives, in which only the present exists, or at most only the past and the present, and by showing that showing how eternalism provides the best account of the passage of time and is not just consistent with three dimensionalism or endurantism about ordinary objects, but also provides the best account of it.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Joshua Mazurski. Are you there? Uh yes I am. Hi, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Well, I'm looking forward to our conversation about uh time, language, and ontology. Uh and um the usual uh way that we like to d begin these uh interviews is to ask a b a little bit about your background as a philosopher. Uh and how you came to this particular project.
Yes. Um Well um I am uh I guess if you go back to what brought me to philosophy in the first place. Um I'm one of those people who uh I've discovered there's more than a few of Who uh came to фолософі фронтом фізикс? So I was a a physics my undergraduate degree is in is in astronomy and physics. And um I was one of these um students who found that um I took some elective courses and was simultaneously drawn to philosophy and um had that experience in in a lot of my physics classes where um interesting philosophical questions would arise and they'd be quickly dismissed in the class as just philosophy and we should just focus on calculation. And that combination, um even though I finished my degree about halfway through, I I found myself very drawn to um philosophy, asking the kinds of questions and uh engaging in the kind of exploration that was really appealing to me.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central claim of Mozersky’s eternalist view of time?
0:00–10:23
2
How does Mozersky’s personal background in physics and philosophy shape his approach to time?
10:23–19:25
3
Why does Mozersky argue that past, present, and future are equally real?
19:25–28:53
4
What are the main challenges to the B‑theoretic view from presentist and empty‑future positions?
28:53–38:42
5
How does Mozersky use a tenseless semantics to explain tensed language like ‘was’, ‘is’, and ‘will be’?
38:42–46:49
6
In what way does Kaplan’s distinction between content and character support a tenseless account of time?
46:49–55:59
7
What objections do philosophers such as Lewis and Meller raise against the relational account, and how does Mozersky respond?
55:59–1:04:10
8
What future projects does Mozersky envision for extending his metaphysical modeling beyond space‑time?
1:04:10–1:12:17
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