A future for presentism (original) (raw)

Logic and Philosophy of Time, 2023

The presentist-if she wants her thesis to be consistent with venerable logical-semantic principles, namely, bivalence and excluded middle-must provide a convincing answer to the grounding problem. Given the idea-already present in classical antiquity-that truth supervenes on being, the grounding problem is used by the eternalist to accuse the presentist of not being in a position to offer an adequate ground for truths that concern the past or future. To address this problem, many thinkers evoke metaphysical doctrines regarding abstract object-a truth about Socrates does not include Socrates himself but only his essence or haecceity. Others seek present grounds for future or past truthsnomic presentism-while still others deny the semantic traditions in question or deny that truth supervenes on being. In this article, I present a new grounding problem to the presentist. Under the assumption that time is infinite, I claim that the presentist does not have at her disposal the foundations for truths that concern infinitely distant objects in the future. Moreover, I present a similar argument to refute 'temporalism', the thesis that at least some truths are temporally indexed. To conclude the argumentative phase, I evaluate the traditional presentist perspective that was advanced in some of the above responses to the typical versions of the problem.

A Philosophical Investigation into Time and Tense

1996

I defend and develop the new tenseless token-reflexive theory of time. I begin by charting the development of the debate between the tensed and the old tenseless theories of time. The tensed theory of time maintains that time exists and is intrinsically tensed. According to the old tenseless theory, time exists and is intrinsically tenseless, the notions of past, present and future being analytically reducible to tenseless temporal relations.

Presentism and the experience of time

Presentists have typically argued that the Block View is incapable of explaining our experience of time. In this paper I argue that the phenomenology of our experience of time is, on the contrary, against presentism. My argument is based on a dilemma: presentists must either assume that the metaphysical present has no temporal extension, or that it is temporally extended. The former horn leads to phenomenological problems. The latter renders presentism metaphysically incoherent, unless one posits a discrete present that, however, suffers from the same difficulties that the instantaneous present is prone to. After introducing the main phenomenological models of our experience of time that are discussed in the literature, I show that none of them favors presentism. I conclude by arguing that if even the phenomenology (besides the physics) of time sides against presentism, the latter metaphysical theory has no scientific evidence in its favor and ought to be dropped.

Presentism and the Flow of Time

The paper examines the relations between presentism and the thesis concerning the existence of the flow of time. It tries to show that the presentist has to admit the existence of the passage of time and that the standard formulation of presentism as a singular thesis saying that only the present exists is insufficient because it does not allow the inference of the existence of the passage of time. Instead of this, the paper proposes a formulation of presentism with the aid of the notion of becoming; not only does a formulation state the existence of the flow of time in such a way as to avoid the question of the rate of the passage of time, it also allows the inference of the existence of only present things and events. The paper demonstrates that the proposed conception of presentism also has other virtues, such as homogeneity, non-triviality, and ability to express dynamicity of presentists' image of the world which testify for it.

1 When am I? A Tense Time for Some Tense Theorists?

2016

Is there anything more certain than the knowledge we have that we are present? It would be a scandal if our best theory of time could not guarantee such knowledge; yet I shall show that certain theories of time (such as Tooley's growing block model and McCall's branching model) cannot guarantee it. Only Presentism and the tenseless theory survive. The rest must be rejected. I: The Present Problem There is a clear partition between tensed and tenseless theories of time: essentially, tense theorists assert that in some objective, mind-independent sense, the present is privileged, whereas tenseless theorists assert that all times are real, no one of which is ontologically privileged. Many tense theorists hold that more than one time is real, yet one among them is privileged, namely the present. This, however, raises the question of how we can know that we are present and not past (or future). I shall call this the Present Problem: Given that we do know we are present, and tha...

Why So Serious? Non-Serious Presentism and the Problem of Cross-Temporal Relations

Metaphysica, 2012

It is a common assumption in the metaphysics of time that a commitment to presentism entails a commitment to serious presentism, the view that objects can exemplify properties or stand in relations only at times at which they exist. As a result, non-serious presentism is widely thought to be beyond the bounds for the card- carrying presentist in response to the problem of cross-temporal relations. In this paper, I challenge this general consensus by examining one common argument in favor of the thesis that presentism entails serious presentism. The argument, I claim, begs the question against non-serious defenders in failing to account for their wider metaontological views concerning non-committal quantification.

Presentism And Temporal Experience

Penultimate draft. Forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience, ed. by Ian Phillips. Introduction When thinking about time, we can distinguish two subjects: the nature of time and our experience of time. A theory of time should be able to accommodate the way we experience temporality. A viable account of temporal consciousness should be compatible with our best theory of time. This article investigates how presentism accounts for our experience of time. According to presentism, all and only present things exist. Presentists argue that their view is the most intuitive, capturing best what most people (pre-philosophically) think about time: you and I exist but the Roman Empire does not exist anymore, whereas the Olympic Games 2020 do not exist yet. Time passes: what is future will be present, what is present will be past and what is past was once present. Presentists not only claim to capture what most people think about time but also how we experience time. In particular, they claim that we all experience time as passing and that this is best explained by the fact that time really does pass. This gives presentism an intuitive advantage over other theories of time. Or so presentists say. This might puzzle some. After all, change is the having of incompatible properties at different times, but since presentism only ever allows one time, the present time, one might wonder if and how presentists can account for change and change experiences. I will concentrate on the latter and focus on two Central Questions. CQ (1): Can presentism, given theory X of temporal perception, account for experiences of change and duration? CQ (2): Can presentism, given theory X of temporal perception, account for experiences of time as passing? Before we consider these questions, however, we will have to look at a more general problem that arises for presentism and perceptual experience in §1. Since we only ever perceive what is already past, presentists owe us an explanation how to make sense of perceptual experience at all. Whether they succeed depends on the theory of perception adopted. From there, I will move on to temporal perception, providing a very brief overview of the debate on temporal perception in §2. §3-§5 aim to answer the Central Questions. Three accounts will be considered: anti-realism, retentionalism and extensionalism. Regarding CQ(1), I argue that the combination of presentism, an indirect theory of perception and retentionalism is most likely able to account for experiences of change, depending on a viable presentist account of causal relations. As for CQ(2), it turns out that none of the combinations considered can accommodate experiences of temporal passage in the sense relevant for presentists. The last section concludes with a short summary of the results of my investigation.

The Old Tenseless Theory Back from the Dead (Philosophia)

Recently, Orilia and Oaklander have attempted to revive the so-called old tenseless theory of time, which most tenseless theorists themselves had given up as untenable, heralding the appearance of the so-called new tenseless theory. I argue that Orilia and Oaklander have not successfully shown that the old tenseless theory of time is still viable.