Here is London Ed, recently returned from his African sojourn, raising some good questions anent my entry, A Critique of Edward Feser's Defense of Presentism, Part I:
>> the presentist idea is not adequately captured by saying that wholly past items no longer exist, since all who understand English will agree to that. The presentist idea is that wholly past items do not exist at all.
But what does ‘exist at all’ mean?
BV: That's part of the problem and part of the fun. You are not saying anything metaphysical when you say that Boston's Scollay Square no longer exists. You are simply pointing out an historical fact. You are not committing yourself to presentism or any version of anti-presentism such as 'eternalism' (a howling misnomer if you want my opinion). You are not 'committing metaphysics' if I may coin a phrase. Committing metaphysics, the presentist is saying that Scollay Square does not exist at all: it is NOTHING because it is wholly past. That is surely not obvious or commonsensical or the view of the man in the street.
To see that, consider that Scollay Square is, as we speak, the intentional object of veridical memories, and the subject of true predications, e.g., 'Scollay Square attracted many a horny young sailor on shore leave.' How then could it be NOTHING? It seems obviously to be SOMETHING, indeed something wholly determinate and wholly actual despite being wholly past. If you say the famous square exists tenselessly at times earlier than the present time (the time simultaneous with my writing), then you uphold its existence but open yourself up to questions about what exactly tenseless existence is, questions that are as easy to formulate as they are hard (or impossible) to answer satisfactorily. Cashing out 'exists at all' in terms of 'exists tenselessly ' is the main way of explaining it.
>> it does not exist, period
Same question. What do ‘period’ and ‘at all’ add?
BV: 'Period,' 'full stop,' 'at all,' simpliciter, sans phrase -- I am using these as stylistic variants of one another. See above response.
>> But note carefully that the second formulation is accurate only if 'exists' is not read as present-tensed, in which case the formulation is tautological, but as 'exists simpliciter,' in which case it is not.
So what does simpliciter add?
BV: See the first response.
>> What exactly it means to 'exist at all' or to 'exist 'simpliciter' is part of the problem of formulating a coherent version of presentism that can withstand close scrutiny. For present purposes we will assume that we understand well enough what these phrases mean.
Yes to the first sentence, no to the second (speaking for myself, perhaps others understand).
BV: But surely, Ed, you understand more or less and well enough to have this discussion. Or are you feigning incomprehension? Or petering out (insider jargon that alludes to Peter van Inwagen's habit of saying that he doesn't understand something.) I will assume that you are not feigning or petering, but doing what analytic philosophers do, namely, demanding CLARITY. Fine. But can't you see that there is a difference between holding that the wholly past is nothing at all and holding that the wholly past is not nothing at all? This is the great problem of the reality of the past. My view is that it is a genuine problem, not a pseudo-problem, but that it is insoluble by us. I don't mean that one cannot give a solution to it. I mean that one cannot give a finally satisfactory solution to it. That makes me a solubility skeptic about this problem.
>> As Feser himself says, on presentism, "there are no past events,"
OK, but there clearly were past events. I wonder if the whole problem rests on an equivocation. We read "there are no past events" as "there were no past events" which has the whiff of paradox and mystery. I caught myself in that equivocation exactly as I was reading it, followed by a double take. Well of course there are no past events, because they have passed over. But there were such things.
Of course you are well aware of that, and we have been on opposite sides of the question for many years. You feel there is some non-trivial sense in which "there are no past events" can be true. I fail to grasp that sense.
BV: You think the following are both obvious: (a) There were past events, and (b) There are no past events. I will grant you that (a) is practically self-evident although not perfectly obvious. Could not the universe have started up right at the beginning of the present with dusty books, etc, as Russell once suggested? Is that not a logical possibility? I can't take that seriously as a real possibility because it implies that there were no past presents -- which seems to commit us to the Solipsism of the Present Moment.
But I disagree with you about (b). You think (b) is obvious. In one sense it is. It is obvious if 'there are' is in the present tense. For then you are saying, trivially, that there are now no (wholly) past events. But in another sense (b) is not obvious, although it might be either false or incoherent. Distinguished philosophers have maintained that there are tenselessly events that are past in the sense that they are earlier than present events, where the A-determination (McTaggart) 'present'' is cashed out B-theoretically.
Is there some non-trivial sense in which 'there are no past events' could be true? You say that if there is such a sense, you cannot grasp it. I say that there is such a sense and that I can grasp it.
I can grasp it because I can grasp what the (unqualified) presentist is saying. He is saying that when a temporal item such as an event loses the A-determination presentness, it becomes nothing at all. It is annihilated. I can understand that because I can understand how it might not be annihilated. It would not be annihilated if (i) there are no irreducible A-determinations, where such a determination is irreducible if irreducible to a B-relation, or (ii) there are irreducible A-determinations but they have no bearing on the tenseless existence of events and other temporal items.
Alles klar?
Gotta meet a man for lunch.
>>To see that, consider that Scollay Square is, as we speak, the intentional object of veridical memories, and the subject of true predications, e.g., 'Scollay Square attracted many a horny young sailor on shore leave.' How then could it be NOTHING? <<
OK so the heavy lifting here is done by consideration of intentional verbs. Thus ‘Bill is thinking, i.e. thinking now, of Scollay Square’. Thus, just as ‘Bill touches the wall of his house’ requires the existence of his house, and its wall, so ‘Bill is thinking of Scollay Square’ requires that the Square be at least something, even if something that no longer exists. If we touch, we touch something, if we think of or remember, so we think of or remember something.
Is that the gist of it?
Posted by: The Bad Ostrich | Saturday, April 13, 2019 at 01:35 AM
Since your focus is always and everywhere linguistic, set aside the intentionality of veridical memories, and concentrate on the sentence I cited:
1. Scollay Square attracted many a horny young sailor on shore leave.
That is a past-tensed sentence that is true now. What has to be the case for the predicate to be true of the referent of 'Scollay Square'? Well, there has to be something that the name refers to. Therefore, it cannot be the case that only (temporally) present items exist/are. For SS is wholly past.
I am assuming that if a predicate is now true of x, then either x existed, or x now exists or x will exist. Do you accept this assumption?
Posted by: BV | Saturday, April 13, 2019 at 02:01 PM
>>Well, there has to be something that the name refers to.
This is just another case of an intentional verb, namely 'refers to'.
(1) 'SS' refers to SS
(2) 'SS' refers to something
(3) There has to be something that 'SS' refers to
(4) SS no longer exists/is not temporally present/is wholly past
(5) It cannot be the case that only temporally present items exist/are. For SS is wholly past.
That's the argument, yes?
>>I am assuming that if a predicate is now true of x, then either x existed, or x now exists or x will exist. Do you accept this assumption?
I accept it.
Posted by: The Bad Ostrich | Sunday, April 14, 2019 at 01:23 AM
Yes,that's the argument.
Presentism is not the claim that what no longer exists does not exist now; it is the claim that what no longer exists does not exist at all.
Now do you understand the last sentence?
Posted by: BV | Monday, April 15, 2019 at 11:44 AM
I honestly don’t really understand ‘does not exist at all’. The argument above shows that a present tensed verb phrase (e.g. ‘refers to’, ‘remembers’, ‘is a picture of’ etc) can take as grammatical accusative a word referring to something that no longer exists. So the non-presentist, while agreeing that the something no longer exists, denies that it does not exist ‘at all’.
That’s as much sense I can make of it.
In the original post, you write
Then could we translate ‘does not exist at all’ as ‘is nothing’ or ‘is not anything’?Posted by: The Bad Ostrich | Tuesday, April 16, 2019 at 05:58 AM