On Absolute Becoming and the Myth of Passage

Steve Savitt

C. D. Broad was a proponent of temporal passage; D. C. Williams was an opponent. What has been lost sight of is that these two remarkable philosophers agreed on a core conception of passage that is more austere than the conception of passage usual in the literature today. I will describe this core idea and try to convince you of its virtues as an account of passage (at least in the spacetime structure of classical physics).

Passage in the core Broad/Williams sense is, I claim, independent of the issues of freedom, determinism, and indeterminism.