Abstract

Philosophers who study time often presuppose that the present is a durationless moment. But the reason is seldom explicitly expressed. There could be at least two arguments for it. And both arguments depend on the implicit assumption that when time passes the present becomes the past. But if we don't take the linear image of time for granted, this assumption is not self-evident though its converse proposition may be. Without this assumption I put forward a new image of the present and the past. The present is non-metrical and when we refer to an event-individual, the past emerges and the present comes to have a breadth. The emergence of the category of event-individuals and that of the past time are cooriginal.