"The Growing Block’s Dubious Past"
In Philosophical Studies, November 2025.
This paper argues that the growing block theory of time (GBT) and others like it seed doubts about their motivations. According to GBT, always, present things begin to exist on the edge of being, the latest part of reality, and then recede into the past, remaining otherwise unchanged. This view is motivated by the idea that positing this edge of being thereby privileges the present over the past. But several lines of reasoning—via recombination of unchanging present things, a higher-dimensional growing block that embeds GBT’s ontology, and non-standard growing blocks that cannot be divided into past and present—converge on the conclusion that, apparently, a presentist ontology can duplicate GBT’s, including its edge of being. Is this apparently presentist ontology in fact the same as GBT’s? Either answer, I argue, ultimately yields the same result: supposing GBT’s ontology is ours, we should doubt that the present is the edge of being, rather than the entirety of our growing block. That undercuts the idea that positing an edge of being privileges the present over the past, undermining GBT’s motivations. And because this argument promises to generalize, theories similar to GBT seem likewise threatened.
Keywords: A-Theory of Time, Growing Block, Non-Presentism, Moving Spotlight, Metaphysical Indeterminacy, Temporarily Non-Concrete
"Eternal Worlds and the Best System Account of Laws"
with Christopher Meacham
In Valia Allori (ed.), Statistical Mechanics and Scientific Explanation: Determinism, Indeterminism and Laws of Nature, World Scientific, May 2020.
In this paper we apply the popular Best System Account of laws to typical eternal worlds – both classical eternal worlds and eternal worlds of the kind posited by popular contemporary cosmological theories. We show that, according to the Best System Account, such worlds will have no laws that meaningfully constrain boundary conditions. It’s generally thought that lawful constraints on boundary conditions are required to avoid skeptical arguments. Thus the lack of such laws given the Best System Account may seem like a severe problem for the view. We show, however, that at eternal worlds, lawful constraints on boundary conditions do little to help fend off skeptical worries. So with respect to handling these skeptical worries, the proponent of the Best System Account is no worse off than their competitors.
Keywords: Best System Analysis of Laws, Statistical Mechanics, Cosmology, Boundary Conditions, Past Hypothesis