The contemporary debate on time which was opened up by J. E. M McTaggart tends to focus on metaphysical issues framed in the dispute between tensed theories and tenseless theories. In the history of the philosophy of time, on the other hand, the subject matter looks strikingly different, and the focus is more wideranging. At least three main categories should be considered: idealism, realism, and relationism. This paper aims to offer an insight into contemporary and classical philosophy of time from a systematic perspective and thereby to suggest a research program worth exploring.

    McTaggart’s paradox and his A-theory and B-theory are basic notions in the contemporary philosophy of time. It is well known that the paradox was introduced by McTaggart’s paper called “The Unreality of Time” published in 1908, so that it has a one-hundred-year history. As for A-theory and B-theory, in contrast, McTaggart himself didn’t consider both of them at all. The notions of A-theory and B-theory came much later, 60 years after the paradox. Moreover, they had not been as popularized as they are today until quite recently, at least after the 1990s. This paper aims to trace the origin of the notions of A-theory and B-theory and show how the debates behind them, especially objections to “spatialising time,” form the notions.

    In this paper, I examine the combination of Presentism and theories of persistence. To do this, first I point out that the current most standard eternalist formulation of theories of persistence, the one based on spatiotemporal location, has three theoretical virtues: (1) it provides a clear understanding of “wholly present”, (2) it allows us to understand the opposition of these theories as substantive, (3) it adequately captures the explanatory nature of these theories. Next, I argue that various presentist formulations of theories of persistence fail to have some of these virtues. This means, I argue, that it is still unclear what it is for presentism that things persist and what it is for presentism to explain persistence.

    In this article, I ask how we should approach environmental issues from an epistemological point of view. Indeed, the living world seems to escape either a naturalistic or a subjectivist perspective. Then, what it is to perceive and know one's environment? This implies rethinking the notion of environment beyond subjectivism and naturalism. I propose to criticise Husserl's egology using some arguments borrowed from the ecological theory of perception, and opposing egology with ecology, understood as a conception that takes as its starting point the relationship of a living being to its milieu, in the light of Watsuji.

    The strong immanent realism (i.e., the view that there exist universals as entities capable of being wholly present wherever their instances are located) has been traditionally criticized for having certain absurd consequences. Although Gilmore (2003) replied to these criticisms by taking spatial relations involving universals as relativized to their locations, his reply has been rebutted by Keskinen et al. (2015). This paper aims to defend the strong immanent realism by proposing a new version of the relativization strategy, according to which a spatial relation is to be relativized just to the extent that it contains universals or concrete particulars among its terms. This version, it will be argued, can satisfactorily address the objections hitherto posed to the strong immanent realism.

    Nishiyama and Mineshima argued that free enrichment is applicable to NPs other than predicate nominals. This paper first shows that free enrichment is also inapplicable to other focal NPs, suggesting that they missed making a generalization. I next argue that their account of free enrichment of noun phrases is conceptually untenable, mainly because the listener, when applying free enrichment, cannot determine what concepts should be supplemented to the NP concept, although such added concepts have to be communicated since they constitute a part of explicature. These conundrums are solved from the standpoint of Reference File Theory, which claims that the meanings of NPs are mental representations of their referents in the listenerʼs mind estimated by the speaker.

    Wittgensteinʼs so-called “private language argument” denies the normativity of private definitions, and suggests that sensation words are taught through replacing primitive behaviour expressive of sensations. However, these observations fail to provide a full understanding of mental concepts of our ordinary language. In this article, the relevance of the concept of secondary sense is brought to the fore through examining the concept of particular feelings inherent in various experiences and also that of calculation in the head. It is shown that natural linguistic reactions present in the use of words in the secondary sense are essential in gaining an overview of our ordinary language.