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This chapter serves as an introduction to the themes of the book. The thesis of temporal supervenience is that all facts about ordinary time, all facts shaped by our ordinary temporal discourse, logically supervene on facts about spacetime; what goes on in spacetime fully determines what goes on in ordinary time. Temporal supervenience has many aspects, corresponding to various kinds of supervenient temporal phenomena. Among the most basic phenomena are persistence and change through ordinary time. The problem of temporal supervenience with respect to these phenomena has two components. The first component is to specify the spatiotemporal supervenience base of persistence and change. How do objects occupy spacetime? And how are properties instantiated across occupied spacetime? The second component is to build an explanatory bridge from the supervenience base to the supervenient phenomena. Such a bridge requires an ‘analysis’ of temporal existence and temporal instantiation, that is, a semantic account of ordinary temporal predications such as ‘a was F’. The problem of temporal supervenience thus connects the metaphysics of time with the semantics of temporal discourse. Before the supervenience of ordinary temporal facts on spacetime facts can be explained, the shape of ordinary time needs to be clarified. This is a further task of Chapter 1. Tenserism and A-time are criticized in the context of temporal supervenience with the aim of promoting detenserism as the correct account of tense and B-time as the true shape of ordinary time.

I begin by discussing what a theory of time is and what it should aim to do. Then discusses the initial plausible candidates for a theory of time; shows how best to frame the debate between tensed and tenseless theories of time; and discusses the tenseless theory, and the various tense theories, such as the growing block view of Tooley, the branching‐future view of McCall, and presentism.

I introduce the Present Problem: how can a theory of time guarantee the infallible knowledge that we have that we are present? I show that only presentism and the tenseless theory can satisfy this requirement, and thus all other theories, such as Tooley's growing block theory and McCall's branching‐future theory, should be rejected.

In a recent influential paper, King offers empirical evidence against the assumption that there are tense operators in English. King argues that the metalinguistic truth-conditions for tensed sentences offered by eternalists are to serve as representations of the logical form of these sentences as well. A sentence like ‘John was a firefighter’ thus contains the quantified noun phrase ‘some past time’ rather than the past-tense operator ‘it was the case that’ at the level of logical form. Here I show why this argument is potentially troublesome for the temporalist and propose a solution.

This chapter discusses the sequence of tense in complement clauses and object relative clauses. It shows how, given very simple semantic principles, the basic semantic phenomena associated with sequence of tense will follow. It then takes up the fundamental question of this chapter — the asymmetry between complement clauses and object relatives — and argues that an answer proposed since 1993, indebted to the proposal of Ogihara (1989), is incorrect. Finally, the chapter provides an alternative answer and remarks some questions that remain open.

David Kaplan was one of the most vivid supporters of the view that there are temporal contents which tense operators operate on. The conclusion that the truth-value of sentence content may be sensitive to time shifts does not by itself qualify as temporalism. If there are tense operators in English, then Kaplan’s argument succeeds in establishing that temporal contents satisfy the condition that they are contents that some intensional operators operate on. Since we have already argued that temporal contents satisfy the other conditions for being a proposition, we could take Kaplan’s argument to show that temporal contents are propositions. In response to Kaplan’s argument, several eternalists have defended the view that sentences have two kinds of content, temporal and eternal, but that only eternal content has proposition-status. The two kinds of content are also known as ‘compositional content’ and ‘assertoric content’. Rather than simply referring back to the general objections to eternalism provided in the first three chapters, I shall here offer independent arguments against each of the double-content strategies.

This chapter takes up the treatment of the simple tenses, past, present, future, and the progressive. Tense is treated as introducing a restricted indexical quantifier over times which binds an implicit argument place in tensed verbs. It is also argued that the progressive is not properly treated as a tense of the verb from which it is derived.

This chapter focuses on two main issues: the issue of indexicality, and the extension of the notions of logic to indexical languages; and the issue of the notation itself. It begins with a discussion of logical syntax, and then turns from there to possible characterizations of the notion of consequence. It concludes with a discussion of some further semantic phenomena, which underscore the need to take context and language together.

This chapter considers the question of how tensed thoughts differ from tenseless ones, and cites certain parallels between tense in thought and tense in language, with consequences for semantic theory. On some proposals for the semantics of tense and temporal indexicals (words like ‘now’ and ‘then’), the difference between tensed thoughts and tenseless thoughts either cannot be made out or, if it does come in, requires special attention. These proposals have their rationale in the behaviour of tense and temporal indexicals in conjunction with modality, as discussed most prominently in David Kaplan (1977). It is argued that the behaviour of modals should be re-evaluated in light of the distinction between tensed thoughts and tenseless thoughts. It this is true then what requires explaining is not how tensed thoughts are to be constructed, but rather the peculiar behaviour of modality, in that it may efface distinctions among thoughts.

This chapter extends the discussion of sequence of tense so as to include some properties of the English Perfect, and so as to clarify some pieces of the construction thus far left open. It calls attention to some features referred to as indexical mismatch between adverbials and tenses, a phenomenon that may well extend in a number of directions, both within individual languages and cross-linguistically. In large part, however, the purpose is to show that anaphoric theories of tense do exactly what needs to be done to explain the dependencies of c-commanded tenses upon c-commanding ones, and that alternatives — notably those of the sort proposed in Ogihara (1995), von Stechow (1995), and Abusch (1994; 1997) — must build back into their respective accounts the anaphoric properties of sequence of tense if those accounts are to be part of an empirically adequate system.

This chapter examines the English Progressive, concentrating upon the issues surrounding what David Dowty (1977) dubbed the ‘imperfective paradox’. The discussion concerns a single part of the general problem of tense and aspect, both within languages and cross-linguistically. That general problem has three pieces, namely: (i) what is the interpretation of tense and aspect?; (ii) what is the nature of the syntactic structures to be interpreted?; and (iii) what are the principles through which the mapping from these structures to the meaning is effected? None of these pieces can be assumed in advance: all must be solved simultaneously.

This chapter explores the general thesis that the English Perfect is purely aspectual, serving to shift from a predicate of events e to a predicate of events that are results of e. To the extent that this thesis is defensible, the Perfect is not involved in the Tense system at all, except derivatively (because Tense applies to the Perfect itself). The investigation of the Perfect interlocks with a number of metaphysical questions concerning the nature of events and situations, and further issues in the syntax and semantics of sequence of tense in English.