|Abstract||Â“We are always already thrown into concrete factual
circumstances, facing possibilities that we need to come to
grips with. By choosing some we exclude others, thus making them
no longer possible.Â What we are thrown into is the past and
present, and the possibilities loom ahead of us, though we may
try to turn our back on them.Â The future is the home of the
possibilities while the present and past define the
circumstances in which we make our choices, circumstances we can
no longer affect.Â”Â Or so we might say, and there is something
right about this way of talking.Â Our basic conception of
ourselves as agents is radically temporally asymmetric. And so
we adopt asymmetric metaphors for time: we talk of time having a
direction, as flowing from the future, through the present, to
the past, closing possibilities that once were open; or perhaps
we think of time as a measure of our own movement from the past
to the future. Such metaphors are of very limited value.Â To
think of time as having a direc