Temporal experience as metaphysically lightweight

Abstract: Experience is the most primitive kind of intentional contact with reality. Metaphysical inquiry is one of the heights of human thought. It wouldn’t be surprising if experience was often silent on metaphysics, failing to offer support to one metaphysical disputant over the other, forcing them to fall back on non-experiential considerations. I argue that the dispute between A- and B-theorists about time is a dispute about which experience is silent. B-theorists have typically conceded that the manifest image of time conflicts with how time turns out to be, on their own view of time. They have offered an array of accounts of why that conflict shouldn’t worry us. I argue here that these accounts are unconvincing. I also argue that they are unnecessary. Nothing about how time is experienced conflicts with B-theory. An independently plausible method for discovering what properties experience represents – the method of phenomenal contrast – implies that experience does not favor A-theory over B-theory.