B-time: a reply to Tallant

The aim of Jonathan Tallant's recent article ‘What is B-time?’ (2007) is to demonstrate that B-time – which holds that time consists solely of tenseless temporal relations – is something of which we have no understanding, and that, therefore, if mind-independent time is B-time, then time is unreal. Of course, implicit in his own position is that since time is plausibly real and we do understand what time is, the correct ontology of time is A-time or tensed time. How then does Tallant purport to substantiate the crucial claim that ‘we have no understanding of what “B-time” is’ (2007: 147)? The overall structure of his argument may be stated as follows:1 Argument A ... In this paper we shall argue that this argument fails, since it is either invalid because it equivocates on the notions of ‘temporal phenomenology’ and ‘phenomenology of temporal passage’, unsound because it rests on one or more false premisses, or question-begging because it assumes an A-theoretic ontology of time.