<p>This&nbsp;open access&nbsp;monograph&nbsp;offers&nbsp;a detailed study and a systematic defense of&nbsp;a&nbsp;key&nbsp;intuition&nbsp;we typically have, as human beings, with respect to&nbsp;the nature of time:&nbsp;the intuition that&nbsp;the future is open, whereas the past is fixed. For example, whereas it seems unsettled whether there will be a fourth world war, it is settled that there was a first world war.</p><p><br></p><p>The&nbsp;book&nbsp;contributes, in particular,&nbsp;three major and original insights. First, it&nbsp;provides&nbsp;a coherent, non-metaphorical, and metaphysically illuminating elucidation of the intuition. Second, it determines which model of the temporal structure of the world is most appropriate to accommodate the intuition, and settles on a specific version of the Growing Block Theory of time (GBT). Third, it&nbsp;puts forward&nbsp;a naturalistic foundation&nbsp;for&nbsp;GBT, by exploiting recent results of our best physics (viz. General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Gravity).</p><p></p>

Three main challenges are addressed: the dismissal of temporal asymmetries as non-fundamental phenomena only (e.g., thermodynamic or causal phenomena), the epistemic objection against GBT, and the apparent tension between GBT and relativistic physics.&nbsp;It is argued&nbsp;that the asymmetry between the open future and the fixed past must be grounded in the temporal structure of the world, and that this is neither precluded by our epistemic device, nor by&nbsp;the latest&nbsp;approaches to Quantum Gravity (​e.g., the Causal Set Theory).<p></p>

<p>Aiming&nbsp;at reconciling time as we find it in ordinary experience and time as physics describes it, this&nbsp;​innovative&nbsp;book&nbsp;​will raise the interest of both academic researchers and&nbsp;​graduate students working on the philosophy of time. More generally, it&nbsp;​presents contents of interest for all metaphysicians and&nbsp;non-dogmatic philosophers of physics.</p><br><p></p><p>This is an open access book.</p>