A future for presentism (original) (raw)
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A new grounding problem for presentism
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.
2004
* Apologies to Mark Hinchliff for stealing the title of his dissertation. (See Hinchliff, A Defense of Presentism. As it turns out, however, the version of Presentism defended here is different from the version defended by Hinchliff. See Section 3.1 below.) 1 More precisely, it is the view that, necessarily, it is always true that only present objects exist. At least, that is how I am using the name 'Presentism'. Quentin Smith has used the name to refer to a different view; see his Language and Time. Note that, unless otherwise indicated, what I mean by 'present' is temporally present, as opposed to spatially present.
2014
This paper argues that recent arguments to the effect that the debate between presentism and eternalism lacks any metaphysical substance ultimately fail, although important lessons can be gleaned from them in how to formulate a non-vacuous version of presentism. It suggests that presentism can best be characterized in the context of spacetime theories. The resulting position is an ersatzist version of presentism that admits merely non-present entities as abstracta deprived of physical existence. Ersatzist presentism both escapes the charges of triviality and promises to offer a route to solving the grounding problem which befalls its more traditional cousins. 1 Introduction: presentism and its motivations Presentism accords an ontologically central role to the present, at the existential expense of past and future entities. It thereby asserts, with some intuitive appeal, that there remains a fundamental difference between time and space: while we all happily concede that other spati...