Nothing Comes Next

Abstract

There are many problems with temporal continuity, but there is a hard one for those philosophers who believe that the world is existentially dynamical. In particular, this holds for those who take seriously the requirement that in such a world must vary what exists unrestrictedly. As a paradigmatic case study, the paper discusses the Growing Block Theory (GBT) of time, as recently presented by Correia and Rosenkranz who consider temporal passage in the strong existential sense of the term. Then, it will be shown that their account fails to do justice to the continuity-requirement: nothing comes next. Without the time continuum, however, the genuinely temporal character of the dynamics gets lost: the objection of spatial analogue turns back. Finally, the paper suggests that Kantian consciousness-dependence is what one needs in order to get a genuinely temporal dynamics that really makes it distinguishable from mere variation across space.