Presentism and Actualism

Presentism, some say, is either the analytic triviality that the only things that exist now are ones that exist now or the obviously false claim that the only things that have ever existed or will are ones that exist now. I argue that the correct understanding of presentism is the latter and so understood the claim is not obviously false. To appreciate this one has to see presentism as strictly analogous to anti-Lewisean actualism. What this modal analogue makes evident is that singular tensed statements can have scope ambiguities and so can be thought of as true with the temporal operator represented by the tense read as having wide scope. Secondly, I argue that the analogy with the modal case also makes it clear that presentism must be understood as a thesis of the form: ‘the only things that have ever existed or ever will exist stand in relation R to this (present) utterance’, and is not a substantive topic for debate until relation R is characterized in non-temporal terms. However, despite the strict analogy, I argue that presentism may be a harder position to defend than actualism, since the truth-maker objection, properly interpreted, with Lewis, as based on a supervenience thesis, has more force as an objection to presentism since supervenience is itself a modal notion.

     

Presentism and the objection from being-supervenience

In this paper, we show that presentism—the view that the way things are is the way things presently are—is not undermined by the objection from being-supervenience. This objection claims, roughly, that presentism has trouble accounting for the truth-value of past-tense claims. Our demonstration amounts to the articulation and defence of a novel version of presentism. This is brute past presentism, according to which the truth-value of past-tense claims is determined by the past understood as a fundamental aspect of reality different from things and how things are.     

Presentism and fatalism

It is widely believed that presentism is compatible with both a libertarian view of human freedom and an unrestricted principle of bivalence. I argue that, in fact, presentists must choose between bivalence and libertarianism: if presentism is true, then either the future is open or no one is free in the way that libertarians understand freedom.     

Presentism and the Triviality Objection

Presentism is usually understood as the thesis that only the present exists whereas the rival theory of eternalism is usually understood as the thesis that past, present, and future things are all equally real. The significance of this debate has been threatened by the so-called triviality objection, which allegedly shows that the presentist thesis is either trivially true or obviously false: Presentism is trivially true if it is read as saying that everything that exists now is present, and it is obviously false if read as saying that everything that has existed, exits or will exist is present. If eternalism is taken as the negation of presentism, it is also either trivially false or obviously true. In this paper, I try to respond to the triviality objection on behalf of presentism. In second section, I will examine how the argument proceeds. In third section, I will reflect on three possible ways to respond but will argue that none of them succeeds in giving a satisfactory solution. I will then try to clarify the core idea of presentism and to suggest that if we characterise presentism accurately, the problem will disappear. In fourth section, I will offer a plausible definition of presentism and will show how it can avoid the triviality objection and demonstrate why it is advantageous to accept the version of presentism I offer.     

Presentism and the Myth of Passage

Presentism is held by most to be the intuitive theory of time, due in large part to the view's supposed preservation of time's passage. In this paper, I strike a blow against presentism's intuitive pull by showing how the presentist, contrary to overwhelming popular belief, is unable to establish temporal change upon which the passage of time is based. I begin by arguing that the presentist's two central ontological commitments, the Present Thesis and the Change Thesis, are incompatible. The main problem is that satisfying the Change Thesis to establish passage requires the existence of more than one moment. This conflicts with the Present Thesis that only the present moment exists. The presentist's response is to appeal to surrogates to stand proxy for the past, so as to account for the difference between what does exist and what did exist. I argue that, for this surrogate strategy to be successful, the proposed surrogates must track what actually happened. I demonstrate that there is no guarantee that this is the case. As a result, the presentist's preservation of temporal change fails, which means that there is no passage in presentism. In the end, we should rethink just how intuitive presentism happens to be.     

Presentism and Truth-making

Here, I defend the view that there is no sensible way to pin a truth-maker objection on presentism. First, I suggest that if we adopt truth-maker maximalism then the presentist can requisition appropriate ontological resources with impunity. Second, if we deny maximalism, then the presentist can sensibly restrict the truth-maker principle in order to avoid the demand for truth-makers for talk about the non-present.     

Presentism and the Notion of Existence

The aim of this paper is to make presentism a dynamic view of reality by basing it on a notion of dynamic existence, that is, on a notion of existence which has a dynamic character. The paper shows that both of the notions of existence which are used in metaphysical theories of time (in presentism and eternalism) have a static character and, while such a notion is useful for eternalists, it is useless for presentists if they want to make their view able to remain in agreement with our everyday experience and self-consistent. It is demonstrated that both empirical and theoretical arguments indicate that the presentist should replace the notion of this static existence with the notion of a dynamic existence and that this maneuver allows the presentist to treat his/her existential thesis as equivalent to the thesis that time flows. Not only does this strategy allow us to express presentism in a simple, homogenous way which remains in agreement with our experience, but also permits us to solve some of the difficult problems which presentism faces, such as, for example, the objection of triviality and the question about the rate of time passage. Moreover, such an approach to presentism allows us to solve fundamental metaphysical problems concerning time such as the problem of the openness of the future and the fixity of the past, direction of causation, and relations between presentism and persistence through time by endurance.     

Presentism, and speaking of the dead

Presentists standardly conform to the eternalist??s paradigm of treating all cases of property-exemplification as involving a single relation of instantiation. This, we argue, results in a much less parsimonious and philosophically explanatory picture than is possible if other alternatives are considered. We argue that by committing to primitive past and future tensed instantiation ties, presentists can make gains in both economy and explanatory power. We show how this metaphysical picture plays out in cases where an individual exists to partake in facts about its past and future, and also in cases where that individual no longer exists, and proxies (or surrogates) for that thing must be found.     

Presentism and the Problem of Cross-Time Relations

Presentism is the view that only present entities exist. Recently, several authors have asked the question whether presentism is able to account for cross-time relations, i.e., roughly, relations between entities existing at different times. In this paper 1 claim that this question is to be answered in the affirmative. To make this claim plausible, I consider four types of cross-time relation and show how each can be accommodated without difficulty within the metaphysical framework of presentism.     

Presentism and the grounding of truth

Many philosophers believe that truth is grounded: True propositions depend for their truth on the world. Some philosophers believe that truth??s grounding has implications for our ontology of time. If truth is grounded, then truth supervenes on being. But if truth supervenes on being, then presentism is false since, on presentism, e.g., that there were dinosaurs fails to supervene on the whole of being plus the instantiation pattern of properties and relations. Call this the grounding argument against presentism. Many presentists claim that the grounding argument fails because, despite appearances, supervenience is compatible with presentism. In this paper, I claim that the grounding argument fails because, despite appearances, truth??s grounding gives the presentist no compelling reason to adopt the sort of supervenience principle at work in the grounding argument. I begin by giving two precisifications of the grounding principle: truthmaking and supervenience. In Sect.?2, I give the grounding argument against presentism. In Sect.?3, I argue that we should distinguish between eternalist and presentist notions of grounding; once this distinction is in hand, the grounding argument is undercut. In Sect.?4, I show how the presentist??s notion of grounding leads to presentist-friendly truthmaking and supervenience principles. In Sect.?5, I address some potential objections.     

Semantic Externalism and Presentism

Abstract

In this paper I discuss an unconventional form of presentism which, I claim, captures better than all other versions of the doctrine the fundamental notion underpinning it, namely, the notion that ‘only what is present is real’. My proposal is to take this maxim as stating, not the rather uncontroversial view that past things are not real now, but the more radical idea that they never were. This rendition of presentism is, I argue, the only one that is neither trivial nor absurd. I examine this proposal by considering it against a sceptical hypothesis that bears similarities to it, viz., the hypothesis that the world was created five minutes ago. On this hypothesis, the past, all but five minutes of it, is unreal, in precisely the sense in which the presentism I discuss claims it is. I show that, assuming semantic externalism, this sceptical hypothesis cannot be sustained, but that a somewhat weaker hypothesis, the Creationist hypothesis that the world is 5,768 years old, cannot be refuted. Together, these conclusions enable a demarcation of those presentist intuitions that language and thought tolerate and those they do not.     

Presentism and Diversity in the History of Psychology

Providing an entry on the history of psychology for the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia has proved to be more problematic than one might expect. In particular, someone who goes under the internet name, ‘Jagged_85’ inserted claims to the effect that most of the major developments in the history of psychology have their origins in the medieval Arab world. Similar claims and at least one attempt to challenge those claims have appeared in the professional literature. A special issue of the online newsletter, Advances in the History of Psychology devoted to this topic has also appeared under the title, “Presentism in the Service of Diversity?” The term, “presentism” has several meanings but it usually refers to projecting the views of the present onto the past instead of making a serious attempt to understand how historical figures themselves understood the world. The present paper endorses the view that the claims of authors like ‘Jagged_85’ constitute presentism in the usual sense of the term. It also offers suggestions for how diversity without this type of presentism might be achieved.     

The Hard Road to Presentism

It is a common criticism of presentism – the view according to which only the present exists – that it errs against truthmaker theory. Recent attempts to resolve the truthmaker objection against presentism proceed by restricting truthmaker maximalism (the view that all truths have truthmakers), maintaining that propositions concerning the past are not made true by anything, but are true nonetheless. Support for this view is typically garnered from the case for negative existential propositions, which some philosophers contend are exceptions to truthmaker maximalism. In this article, we argue that a ‘no truthmakers’ approach to the truthmaker objection is critically flawed.     

Presentism,eternalism, and phenomenal change

Normally, when we notice a change taking place, our conscious experience has a corresponding quality of phenomenal change. Here it is argued that one’s experience can have this quality at or during a time when there is no change in which phenomenal properties one instantiates. This undermines a number of otherwise forceful arguments against leading metaphysical theories of change, but also requires these theories to construe change as a secondary quality, akin to color.     

Presentism,truthmakers and distributional properties

Presentists face a challenge from truthmaker theory: if you hold that the only existing objects are presently existing objects and, moreover, you agree that truth supervenes on being, then you will be hard pressed to identify some existent on which a given true but traceless claim about the past supervenes. Cameron (Philos Books 49:292–301, 2008, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, In: D Zimmerman (ed), 2011) aims to meet this challenge by appeal to distributional properties. So, to give a simple example, the truth that you were once a child supervenes on you presently instantiating the property of being initially a child and then an adult, a property distributed over time. I argue that a presentist ought to deny that distributional properties can serve as truthmakers.     

Presentism,persistence and trans-temporal dependence

My central thesis is that presentism is incompatible with all of the main theories of persistence: endurance, exdurance (stage theory) and perdurance.     

Quantitative Parsimony and the Metaphysics of Time: Motivating Presentism

In this paper I argue that presentism—the view that only present objects exist—can be motivated, at least to some degree, by virtue of the fact that it is more quantitatively parsimonious than rival views.