Understanding the temporal in economics

Studies by the English economist John Maynard Keynes himself and a number of his professional successors - and not least Victoria Chick - leave no doubt that the concept of time should be of central importance in economic analysis. It is also indisputable that in the sense of one of Keynes' old teachers, the philosopher of the time, McTaggart, it is the A-series with past, present and future that is the focus and not only the B-series with before, now and after. This raises the interesting epistemological problem of being able to distinguish between past, present and future, and how theory formation and methodology should be handled.