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Film, metaphor, and the reality of time

The year 2008 marked the 100-year anniversary of both McTaggart's essay on the unreality of time and Minkowski's famous lecture introducing the notion of a unified space-time. Both McTaggart and Minkowski doubt the aptness of the common-sense metaphors of the ‘passage’ of time, a doubt that has become almost paradigmatic in contemporary mainstream philosophy and science. As physicist Julian Barbour puts it, time does not really flow, it is the brain that ‘plays a movie’ for us. By contrast, the present paper argues that even if our brain does play a movie for us, we have no reason to believe that the world shown by that movie is illusory. The paper taps the resources of conceptual metaphor theory, showing that time, in a way, is directly experienced, but it is not directly conceptualized: the notion of time is articulated via images and metaphors of spatial movement. Veridical images lead through inevitable metaphors to what is the common-sense idea of becoming and the flow of time; philosophy should defend, rather than explain away, this idea. And a philosophical defense of the reality of time, even if only indirectly, might fruitfully draw on film theory, namely, the realist tradition in film theory.