Side by side

Compare all views

Every thinker on the site in one table: whether time flows, what they take to be real, and the point where each comes closest to Deutsch and the point where each parts from him.

Lifespans, coloured by view: Does not flow Flows Qualified. Each bar links to the thinker's page; each panel has its own scale. Le Poidevin, Ismael and Callender are left off, as their dates aren't given on this site.

Views of time compared with Deutsch's
Thinker	Does time flow?	What is real?	Agrees with Deutsch	Parts from Deutsch
Deutsch	Does not flow No. The idea is incoherent.	The multiverse: every moment, in every universe.	The reference point for every row.
Heraclitus	Flows Yes. Flow is the deepest fact about the world.	The flux, ordered by a hidden measure, the logos.	Change is real.	Flow is fundamental, not an error.
Parmenides	Does not flow No. Nothing comes to be or passes away.	One undivided, unchanging whole.	Nothing comes into existence; the passage we feel is an error.	Reality is one; change is unreal.
Zeno	Qualified The ordinary idea of flow through instants leads to absurdity.	Parmenides' one, unmoving reality.	A single instant contains no motion.	Motion itself is not real.
Plato	Flows Yes, as an image: it moves by number while eternity stays still.	The eternal model; time is its moving image.	There is no time before the world.	Two levels of reality; time still moves.
Aristotle	Flows Yes: the now follows change, earlier to later.	One eternal cosmos; time is the number of its change.	Time is defined by change, not a container.	A moving now; one continuous time.
Augustine	Flows It passes: future through present into past.	The present; past and future only in the mind.	Our sense of past and future is in the present contents of the mind.	Past and future are not real; God's eternity lies outside time.
Newton	Flows Yes, equably, of its own nature.	Bodies in absolute space and absolute time.	Deterministic laws glue the moments together.	Time is absolute and flows, though none of his laws uses the flow.
Leibniz	Qualified Not his question; time is the order of change.	Monads, ordered in succession.	No time outside the order of events.	Other possible worlds are merely possible.
Kant	Qualified Experience is successive; time itself is a form, not a thing.	Things in themselves, unknowable; time is the form of experience.	"What came before the world?" rests on a false picture of time.	Time is not physical, and some knowledge of it is a priori.
Bergson	Flows Yes: duration is pure flow.	Lived duration.	A line with a moving now is a confused picture of time.	Snapshots are an illusion of the intellect.
McTaggart	Qualified Time would need flow, and flow is contradictory.	A timeless reality; time is unreal.	A moving now leads to a vicious regress.	Change in the B-series is not change; time is unreal.
Einstein	Does not flow Past, present and future are an illusion.	A single spacetime.	There is no universal now.	Spacetime is the whole story; one world.
Prior	Flows Yes. Truth changes as the present advances.	Only the present.	The future is open.	Presentism: other moments are not real.
Mellor	Does not flow No. There are no tensed facts.	All events, tenselessly ordered.	Now is like here.	Causation within a single spacetime.
Le Poidevin	Does not flow No. The tenseless theory is true.	All times; the present is a matter of perspective.	The present is not objective.	A single history, not a multiverse.
Barbour	Does not flow No. There are only static Nows.	Static Nows in a timeless landscape, Platonia.	Reality is snapshots, ordered by their contents.	Time does not exist; causation is less central.
Smolin	Flows Yes. Time is real and fundamental.	The present moment, in one universe.	Realism; the future is open.	Flow, evolving laws, one world: nearly everything.
Rovelli	Qualified Not fundamentally; flow emerges from a blurred view.	Events and their relations.	No flow at bottom; no global now.	Relational quantum mechanics, not a multiverse.
Carroll	Does not flow No, not in fundamental physics.	A branching quantum state: many worlds.	Many worlds; the arrow comes from the second law.	Causation is emergent, not objective.
Price	Does not flow No. View it from nowhen.	A time-symmetric world, seen from nowhen.	Causes need not precede effects everywhere.	Causation is perspectival; retrocausality.
Maudlin	Flows Yes: passage is a direction built into spacetime.	All of spacetime, with a built-in direction.	Realism; causation is objective.	Time passes, at one second per second.
Ismael	Does not flow No; passage is a changing perspective.	A block universe, seen from inside.	Passage is how perceptions and memories look from within.	The future can be open in a single fixed block.
Callender	Does not flow No; flow is part of the manifest image.	Spacetime, with time singled out by the laws.	The laws determine along time.	Laws are summaries, not real structure.

Each row condenses the thinker's own page, where the comparison is set out in full. "Qualified" marks views that neither affirm nor simply deny flow: Zeno argues it is absurd, Leibniz and Kant ask what time is rather than whether it passes, McTaggart argues that time itself is unreal, and Rovelli that flow emerges only from a blurred view.