On June 19, 2025 at 14:00 EEST, Marian Călborean (University of Bucharest) will give a talk in the Logic Seminar.
Title: The minimal ontology of time – a unified axiomatization
Abstract:
How minimal can ontology be and still accommodate the main logical and metaphysical stances about time? I present a first-order set-theoretic framework, no stronger than ZFC, in which (i) the underlying axioms are pairwise independent; (ii) the canonical positions in temporal metaphysics, from presentism and the growing-block (cf. Prior 1967; Cameron 2015) to eternalism (Sider 2001) and Fine’s fragmentalism (Fine 2005), become parameter settings; (iii) standard well-behaved tense, metric, or interval logics (Prior’s PF, MTL, ITL) receive a sound and complete semantics via a representation theorem. On grounds of explanatory reach and parsimony, the growing-block emerges as the least problematic ontology of time within this minimal framework.
The talk will take place physically at FMI (Academiei 14), Hall 214 “Google”.