Metaphysics
Smart's main contribution to metaphysics is in the area of philosophy of time. He has been an influential defender of the B-Theory of time, and of perdurantism.
His most important original arguments in this area concern the passage of time, which he claimed is an illusion. He argued that if time really passed, then it would make sense to ask at what rate it passes, but this requires some second time-dimension with respect to which passage of normal time can be measured. This in turn faces the same problems, and so there must be a third time-dimension, and so on. This is called the rate of passage argument.
Smart has changed his mind about the nature and causes of the illusion of the passage of time. In the 1950s, he held that it was due to people's use of anthropocentric temporal language. He later came to abandon this linguistic explanation of the illusion in favour of a psychological explanation in terms of the passage of memories from short-term to long-term memory.
Read more about this topic: J. J. C. Smart
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