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After discussing rival positions in the philosophy of time, in Part I Craig Bourne shows how presentism is the only viable alternative to the tenseless theory of time. He then develops a distinctive version of presentism that avoids the mistakes of the past, and which sets up the framework for
solving problems traditionally associated with the position, such as what makes past-tensed statements true, how to give the proper semantics for statements about the future, how to deal with transtemporal relations between the past and the present, how we can meaningfully talk about the future, how
to deal with transtemporal relations between the past and the present, how we can meaningfully talk about past individuals, and how causal relations can be formulated. Part I concludes with a discussion of the direction of time and causation, the decision-theoretic problem known as Newcomb's
problem, and the possibility of time travel and causal loops. In Part II Bourne focuses on the problems for presentism raised by relativity theory. He begins with by giving a self-contained exposition of the concepts of special relativity that are important for understanding the later discussion of
its philosophical implications. The last two chapters explore the philosophical implications of certain cosmological models that arise from general relativity, namely the expanding models, which seem to represent our universe, and Gödel's infamous model, which allows us to take a journey into our
future and arrive in our past. The necessary physics is explained with the aid of diagrams, throughout.