"Only the Present Exists"

The above title gives the gist of presentism in the philosophy of time. It is an answer to Quine's ontological inventory question: What is there?  What, by category, should we count as existent?  The presentist answer is that only (temporally) present items exist: wholly past and wholly future items do not exist.  Among these items are times, events, processes, individual substances, property-instantiations.  

'Only the present exists' is doubly ambiguous. 

FIRST AMBIGUITY

It is first of all ambiguous as between a tautology and a substantive thesis. It depends on how one construes 'exists.'  Is it present-tensed?  Then we get a tautology:

TAUT:  Only the present exists at present.

Presentists, however, are not in the business of retailing tautologies. They are out to advance a substantive and therefore non-tautological claim about what exists.  But to do this, their characteristic thesis cannot sport a present-tensed use of 'exists.'  So they have to say something like this:

SUBS: Only the present exists simpliciter.

But what does 'simpliciter' mean?  One might take it to mean 'tenseless.' Thus

SUBS*: Only the present exists tenselessly.

That is not a tautology. One might reasonably object that (SUBS*) is false on the ground that there are (tenselessly) wholly past and wholly future items such as Julius Caesar, his assassination, and my death.  That is what the so-called 'eternalists' maintain: 

E: Past, present, and future items all exist tenselessly.

All existents are on a par in point of existence. All are equally real.  Boethius exists just as robustly (or as anemically) as I do.  It is just that he exists in the past.  Now most eternalists are B-theorists.  They accept the B-theory of time. And so they would say that 'past,' 'present,' and 'future' can and must be cashed out relationally in terms of the B-relations: earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with.  Boethius exists in the past in that he tenselessly exists at times earlier than some reference time such as the time of my writing this sentence.  He exists just as I do, but elsewhen.  London is elsewhere relative to here, where I flourish, but is no less real than where I flourish.  Gloomier, no doubt, but no less real.

The main thing for 'present' purposes is that presentism and eternalism are both substantive claims. Neither is a tautology and neither is a contradiction.  Note also that if 'exists' in 'Past, present, and future items all exist' is read present-tensedly, then the sentence just mentioned would be a contradiction. We also note that to formulate either presentism or eternalism we must invoke a tenseless sense of 'exists.' 

SECOND AMBIGUITY

Now we notice that 'Only the present exists' is also ambiguous as between

SPM: Only this present exists: there is (tenselessly) exactly one time, the present, at which everything (tenselessly) exists.

and 

PP:  Only the present present exists: there are (tenselessly) many times, and every time t is such that everything that exists exists (tenselessly) at t.

The first view is Solipsism of the Present Moment.  This is a lunatic view, although it seems logically possible. It amounts to saying that everything that ever existed and everything that ever will exist exists now. Imagine that the entire universe, together with fossils, monuments, memories, and dusty books just now sprang into existence, lasts a while, and then collapses into non-being.

Presentism as usually understood affirms something like (PP), which implies that there are past presents, a present present, and future presents.  The idea is that, at any given time, whether past, present, or future, all that exists is what exists at that time. If reality is the totality of what exists, (PP) implies that reality is always changing. (PP) implies that reality is 'dynamic' whereas (E) implies that it is static.

(PP) strikes me as problematic. (PP) implies that there are (tenselessly) many different times. But there cannot be (tenselessly) many times if at each time there is only what exists at that time. For if at each time there is only what exists at that time, then at each time there are no times other than that time.  Is there a formulation of presentism that is consistent with its own truth?  I suspect that there isn't.

Presentism is at present very popular among philosophers.  I am wondering why.  Some distinguished writers actually say that it is common sense. What?  The proverbial man on the street has no opinion on any of these questions.

Comments

[David Gudeman]

There is a bit of strain in your use of "exists tenselessly" and I'm not sure it makes sense. I would know what you mean if you were talking about abstract or timeless objects such as numbers or God, but when you apply it to temporal objects, I'm just not sure what it means. Does

X exists tenselessly

just mean

X did exist or does exist or will exist?

If so, then (SUBS*) is a contradiction and (E) is a tautology. If it means something else, then what is that meaning?

[BV]

Dave,

You are asking the right questions. I suspect that it is unintelligible to speak of tenseless existence and tenseless property-possession with respect to items in time. My point above is that it has to be intelligible if presentism is not to collapse into a tautology, and eternalism into a contradiction.

[The Bad Ostrich]

>>Presentism as usually understood

That would be metaphysical presentism, as opposed to grammatical presentism, which holds there is only the tautological sense.

Do you have any citations for metaphysical presentism? I.e. which philosophers have presented a version of presentism in line with your PP?

[BV]

Ostrich,

See the SEP entry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/presentism/

[The Bad Ostrich]

OK that looks fairly clear. The article is characterising what I would call 'metaphysical presentism'.

As I commented by email, metaphysical presentists deserve everything they get; they have entered a contest which they can never win, at best stalemate etc.

We logical presentists are on much safer ground.

[BV]

You are on very safe ground: you are not saying anything !

What you call logical presentism is of no interest whatssever, except as a foil for a position of interest.

[The Bad Ostrich]

No the logical presentist is saying something. He is saying very firmly that there is no presentist claim that is non-trivial, ergo etc. If what he says is true, it follows that metaphysical presentism, which holds (among other things) that there is a non-trivial sense to ‘only the present exists’, is false. So not only is the logical presentist saying something, he is saying something quite important and relevant to the debate between the metaphysical presentist and the metaphysical anti-presentist. He is saying that neither position is true (because both are equally incoherent, senseless etc).

Whether the logical presentist’s claim is true or not (as opposed to whether it is important or not) is a separate question. He could argue by taking any claim by the metaphysician and question whether it makes sense or not.

Take for example the question of whether a thing could exist without existing in the present. The logical presentist might then question what is meant by ‘no longer exists’. The natural interpretation is ‘existed, but does not exist’. But then the thing doesn’t exist, period.

[BV]

You're right in your first two paras.! You are making a meta-claim. You are claiming that 'Only the present exists' can only be read as a tautology. This meta-claim is not a tautology. I conflated the claim and the meta-claim.

>>Take for example the question of whether a thing could exist without existing in the present. The logical presentist might then question what is meant by ‘no longer exists’. The natural interpretation is ‘existed, but does not exist’. But then the thing doesn’t exist, period.<<

Here you go wrong. Using tensed language, it is true that the natural interpretation is ‘existed, but does not exist’. But it doesn't follow that the thing doesn't exist, period. What follows is that thing does not exist NOW.