Maverick Philosopher

A Reason Why We Need Philosophy

You have heard it said, "Take the bull by the horns." But I say unto you, "Take the bull by the shovel."  Enjoy this Substack entry wherein I take some journalistic bull by the shovel.

A 'Temporal' Argument Against Race Change

The following excerpt is 'cannibalized' from my Substack article, Can One Change One's Race?

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Can I change my race? No. I can no more change my race than I can change the fact that I was born in California.  I might have been born elsewhere, of course, but as a matter of contingent fact, I am a native Californian.  Despite the logical contingency of my California birth, there is nothing I or anyone, including God, can do, or could have done, after the fact, to change or annul that fact about my place of birth.  And there is nothing I or anyone can do, or could have done, after the fact, to alter my place of birth, time of birth, weight, or any other contingent detail.

The same goes for race. My race is determined by my biological ancestors. Since both were white, I am white.  To change my race I would have to change a past fact, namely, that I am the product of the copulation of two white parents. But that fact, being past, cannot now be changed or annulled. The argument, then, is this:

1) If I can change my race from white to black, say, then I can change some fact in the distant past, namely, the fact that I am the offspring of two white parents;

2) It is not the case that I can change any past fact including the fact that I am the offspring of two white parents;

Ergo

3) It is not the case that I can change my race.

The argument assumes that it is nomologically necessary (necessary given the laws of nature) that parents of the same race have offspring of the same race, that, e.g., white parents have white offspring. The assumption is obviously true. 

Closer to the Grave, Farther from Birth

Top o' the Stack.

Wherein I ruminate upon the curious modality, necessitas per accidens.

The Ersatz Eternity of the Past: Denied by Lukasiewicz!

The Pole denies the actuality of the past and in consequence thereof the ersatz eternity or accidental necessity (necessitas per accidens) of the past.

Quasi-literary Preamble:

What has been, though it needn't have been, always will have been.  What time has mothered, no future time can destroy.   What you were and that you were stand forever inscribed in the roster of being whether or not anyone  ever reads the record.  What you have done, good or bad, and what you have left undone, good or bad, cannot be erased by the passage of time. You will die, but your having lived will never die. This is so even if you and your works and days are utterly forgotten. An actual past buried in oblivion remains an actual past. The erasure of memories and memorials is not the erasure of their quondam objects. The being of what was does not depend on their being-known; it does not rest on the spotty memories, flickering and fallible, of fragile mortals or their transient monuments or recording devices.

But how paltry the ersatz eternity of time's progeny!  Time has made you and will unmake you.  In compensation, she allows your having been to rise above the reach of the flux.  Thanks a lot, bitch!  You are one mater dolorosa whose consolation is as petty as your penance is hard.

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I posted a precursor of the above on 10 March 2010.  It elicited an astute comment from Alan Rhoda.  He wrote:

You here express the tense-logical idea that p -->FPp, that if something is the case, then it will thereafter always be the case that it has been the case. In Latin, facta infecta fieri non possunt. [The done cannot be undone.]

Believe it not, this has been denied by the famous Polish logician Lukasiewicz, no less. He seems to have accepted a version of presentism according to which (1) all (contingent) truths depend for their truth on what presently exists, and (2) what presently exists need not include anything that suffices to pick out a unique prior sequence of events as "the" actual past. Accordingly, truths about the past may cease to be true as the passage of time obliterates the traces of past events. Lukasiewicz apparently found this a comforting thought:

"There are hard moments of suffering and still harder ones of guilt in everyone’s life. We should be glad to be able to erase them not only from our memory but also from existence. We may believe that when all the effects of those fateful moments are exhausted, even should that happen only after our death, then their causes too will be effaced from the world of actuality and pass into the realm of possibility. Time calms our cares and brings us forgiveness." (Jan Lukasiewicz, "On Determinism" in  Selected Works, ed. L. Borkowski, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1970, p.128.)

That is  to my mind an amazing passage from Lukasiewicz both because of his rejection of the tense-logical principle, p -->FPp,  and because of the consolation he derives from its rejection.

I myself find it very hard to believe that there wasn't an actual unique past. I find it impossible to believe that, with the passage of enough time, past events will somehow go from being actual to being merely possible. It seems obvious to me, a plain datum, that there is an important difference between a past event such as Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen, which actually occurred, and a merely possible (past) event such as his marriage to her which did not occur, but could have  occurred, where 'could have' is to be taken ontically and not epistemically. Now that datum tells against presentism -- unless you bring God into the picture which is what Rhoda does.  For if the present alone exists, then the wholly past does not exist, which implies that there is no difference between a merely possible past event and an actual past event.

Alan Rhoda responds:

Yes, in my paper "Presentism, Truthmakers, and God" (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 2009). I argue that the best way for presentists to supply truthmakers for truths about the past is to appeal to divine memories.

I accept the datanic nature of your distinction between the actual and the merely possible past. I'm not clear, however, on why that distinction by itself should count against presentism. Unlike Lukasiewicz, most presentists do posit present grounds for that distinction. The live question is what sort of present facts, if any, could serve the presentist's purposes. That's where my argument for theistic presentism gets its purchase.

If only that which exists now, exists, then that which existed does not exist. If to exist = to be actual, then that which existed is not actual. Since what existed is presumably not impossible, that which existed is merely possible. It therefore looks as if one can get very quickly from the distinction I pointed out to a rejection of atheistic presentism. Atheistic presentism cannot supply the truth-makers for past-tensed truths such as 'Kierkegaard was engaged to Regine Olsen.'

Atheistic presentists need to find present facts to ground the distinction in question.  Now there are some present facts that could serve to ground some past-tensed truths. Consider 'Bill Sykes the burglar entered my house yesterday.' This contingent truth needs a truth-maker, and on presentism this truth-maker must exist today. Our presentist might plausibly say that it is Sykes' footprints outside my window, and the the broken glass, both of which exist today, that tie Sykes to the crime and make-true the contingent sentence in question.  But what makes it true that my grandfather Alphonso drank a glass of dago red on New Year's Day, 1940 and pronounced it excellent?  Suppose the red wine drunk by Alphonso came from the Gallo vineyard. What now makes it true that that particular glass of dago red came from the Gallo vineyard as opposed to the Cribari vineyard? What exists now that could serve as a truth-maker of such truths?  There are plenty of past-tensed truths that have no presently existing truth-makers.  This is why Rhoda argues that it is only present facts involving divine memories that are up to the truth-making job.

Whether recourse to God and his omniscience works to save presentism we leave for later. 

A Mistake of Memory

Top o' the Stack.

Presentism questioned.

How to Write a Good Comment

I offer a comment of mine as an example.  It is a brief response to a Substack entry by Elliot Crozat.  Here is the comment:

Very nice post, Elliot. Your reconstruction is valid. You say that (2) is "solid." It is, but it is not self-evident. For one epistemically possible view is that the dead are nonexistent objects: they do not exist, but they have being, and have properties. Indeed, they actually have properties; it is not just that they could have properties. So on this view, there is no bar to a dead person's having the property of being communal or standing in the communal relation to other dead persons. This quasi-Meinongian view is skillfully developed by Palle Yourgrau in Death and Nonexistence (Oxford, 2019). It of course has problems of its own.

(5) and (7) are undoubtedly true.

And I agree with you that (1) is reasonably rejected on eternalism which is a plausible alternative to presentism. Surely wholly past individuals are not nothing despite their not being temporally present. They exist, but not at present. Presentists, despite a lot of fancy footwork, have a hard time accounting for this plain fact. This is one reason why eternalism is well-represented among contemporary philosophers. Eternalism allows for a watered-down personal immortality which has been embraced by Einstein, Charles Hartshorne, and most recently by John Leslie. The main difficulty of eternalism is to give a clear account of existence simpliciter. But it appears that the presentist faces the same difficulty assuming that "Only the present exists" is not a miserable tautology that boils down to "Only what exists (present tense) exists (present tense."

As for Aristotle, he is standardly taken to be a presentist (see Feser, e.g.) and thus your invocation of the Stagirite in support of eternalism is questionable.

PROVISIONAL PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS

 

Time, Death, and Existence

 

Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited contains many good lines. Here’s one from near the end of the play: “You can’t be one of the dead because what has no existence can have no community.” As I take it, “one of the dead” means “one belonging to a community of dead persons.”

 

 

JUNE 27, 2023

 

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So what makes my comment good?

 

1. I interact directly with what the  author has written.

2. In doing so, I show that I have made a good faith attempt to understand him.

3. I tell him whether I agree or disagree and why.

4. I do not go off on irrelevant tangents.

5. I keep my comments brief and to the point.

6. I try to be helpful.

7. I do not use his site to promote myself or to advertise my wares or to dump large undigested quotations from other writers.

A Mistake of Memory

One mistake we sometimes make is to confuse a memory of a decision to do something with a memory of having done it. "I thought I did that! No, my man, you merely thought of doing it." 

One morning I wasted time searching for an article I had printed out the day before. But I was searching for a nonexistent object. I hadn't printed it out; I had merely resolved to do so. I confused resolve with result.

Memory, then, is fallible. But it is via memory that we know this. The non-veridical memory of having printed the document is known to be non-veridical by comparison with the veridical memory of having intended to print it. So while fallible, memory is a source of knowledge, and generally reliable, although its powers vary from person to person. 

Veridical memory  of wholly past events gives the lie to presentism, the view that the present alone exists. For if the present alone exists, then the wholly past does not exist. But what does not exist cannot be known. Given that some memories are veridical, presentism is false. 

"So what are you saying, man? That the past is real?"

False Memory

Yesterday I intended to print a document, loaded the paper tray, and then got sidetracked by a phone call.  I forgot about the print job. This morning I falsely remembered having printed the document and then wasted time searching for it. 

What philosophical juice might one squeeze from this lemon?

1) Not all memories could be false. If all memories were false, then one could not know, using memory, that some memories are false. But I do know, by memory, the truth that some memories are false. Therefore, it is not possible that all memories be false. 

2) If presentism is the view that only temporally present events exist, and that wholly past and wholly future events do not exist, then the above example shows that presentism thus defined cannot be true. For I now veridically remember yesterday's intention to print the document, yesterday's loading of the tray, and yesterday's phone call. These events occurred, and I now know they occurred; hence they cannot now be nothing.

Existence, Time, Property-Possession, and the Dead

Here are four propositions that are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. 

1) For any x, temporal or atemporal, if x has a property, then x exists.

2) For any temporal x, if x exists, then x exists at present.

3) Frege, a temporal item, does not exist at present.

4) Frege has properties at present.

(1) is plausible: how could anything have a property if it is not 'there' to have it? This use of 'there' is non-locative.  I assume that to exist = to be, and that Meinongian nonentities, "beyond being and nonbeing," are unintelligible.

(2) is plausible: the past is no longer, the future not yet; the present alone is real/existent!  It is important to note, however, that the plausibility of (2) is not that of a tautology. Tautologies are plausible in excelsis; substantive metaphysical claims are not. One cannot reasonably controvert a tautology; one can reasonably controvert a substantive metaphysical claim. What (2) formulates, call it 'presentism,' is somewhat plausible but surely not logically true. So the senses of 'exist(s)' and 'exist(s) at present' are distinct. If I say that a thing exists, I say nothing about when it exists; I say only that it is 'there' in the non-locative sense among the 'furniture of the world.' Indeed, 'x exists' leaves open whether the thing is in time at all. 'God exists' is noncommittal on the question whether God is temporal or atemporal. 

(3) is plausible: (a) Frege is temporal in that he cannot exist without existing in time; (b) Frege does not now exist.

(4) is plausible: Frege is now famous and he is dead. Those predicates are true of him: he has (instantiates) the properties they express. 

The tetrad is collectively inconsistent. One way to solve the problem is by rejecting the least plausible proposition. By my lights, that proposition is (2). To reject (2) is to reject presentism. But if presentism is false, it does not follow that eternalism is true!  

Memory and Existence: An Aporetic Tetrad

Try this  foursome on for size:

1) Memory is a source of knowledge.

2) Whatever is known, exists.

3) Memory includes memory of wholly past individuals and events.

4) Whatever exists, is temporally present.

The limbs of the tetrad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  To appreciate the logical inconsistency, note that 'exists' in (2) and in (4) have exactly the same sense, and that this is not the present-tensed sense.  It is the tense-neutral and time-independent sense. Something that exists in this sense simply exists: it is one of the things listed in the ontological inventory.  Hence talk in the literature of existence simpliciter.  In both of its occurrences above, 'exists' means: existence simpliciter.

The limbs are individually plausible. But they are not equally plausible. (4) is the least plausible, and thus the most rejectable, i.e., the most rejection-worthy. Rejecting it, we arrive at an argument against presentism given that (4) is a version of presentism, which it is.

1*) Some of what is remembered is known.

2*) All that is known, exists.

Therefore

2.5) Some of what is remembered exists.

3*) All of what is remembered is wholly past.

Therefore

3.5) Some of what exists is wholly past.

Therefore 

~4*) It is not the case that whatever exists, is temporally present. (Presentism is false.)

Back to Time, Tense, and Existence

What follows is a comment by David Brightly which just came in but is buried in the comments to an old entry.  I have added my responses in blue.

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I have just spotted that you quote EJL as saying,

This, of course, raises the question of how we can so much as talk about Caesar now that he no longer exists simpliciter -- how we can speak about 'that which is not.'

My understanding is that 'no longer' is a marker of a tensed verb. So Lowe appears to be using 'to exist simpliciter' as if it were tensed. This leaves me somewhat confused. I'm not at all sure that 'simpliciter' adds (or subtracts) anything here. Lowe's paragraph, minus the 'simpliciter', makes sense as ordinary tensed English.

BV: As you see it, David, 'Caesar no longer exists' and 'Caesar no longer exists simpliciter' express exactly the same thought.  That same thought is expressed by 'Caesar existed but Caesar does not exist (present tense). 'Simpliciter' adds nothing to 'exists.'

I suppose that you will say that the old Platonic riddle of nonbeing -- how can we speak about 'that which is not' when that which is not is not 'there' to be spoken of -- is a pseudo-problem, at least when raised with respect to wholly past items.  I suppose that you will say that we can now refer to Caesar because he existed, and that nothing more need be said. Your view, I take it, is that Caesar can, at the present time, be an object of successful reference and a logical subject of true predications without existing simpliciter or tense-neutrally. It suffices for successful reference to Caesar who is now nothing that he was something, i.e., that he existed. You might take it a step further and argue that the Platonic pseudo-problem arises from a failure to stick to ordinary tensed English, and that the 'problem' is dissolved (as opposed to solved) by simply using the tenses of our beloved mother tongue in their ordinary work-a-day ways and not allowing language to "go on holiday" (Wittgenstein).

To put words in your mouth: you are saying that there is no genuine problem about the reality of the past; said reality  consists solely in the fact that we can use the past tense to make true statements, e. g., 'Churchill smoked cigars.'

Have I understood your position?  If I have, then what we are really discussing is whether the debate that divides presentists and 'eternalists' is a genuine debate or instead a pseudo-debate sired by a misuse of language. 

Also, further down you say,

However things stand with respect to the future, the past surely seems to have a share in reality.

Could you not have said '...the past seems to have had a share...'? Again,

The question is whether what WAS has a share in reality as opposed to being annihilated, reduced to nothing, by the passage of time. [my emphasis]

BV: I don't say it your way because I believe that 'existence simpliciter' has a specific, non-redundant use.  I believe that one can sensibly ask whether what exists (present tense) exhausts what exists simpliciter.  I believe that both of the following are substantive claims:

a) Only what exists (present tense) exists!  

b) It is not the case that only what exists (present tense) exists!

For me, (a) is not a tautology, and (b) is not a contradiction.  Why not? Because, for me,  if x exists simpliciter, it does not follow that x exists (present tense).  So if (a) is true, it is true as a matter of metaphysics, not as a matter of formal logic. And if  (a) is false, it is not false as a matter of formal logic but as a matter of metaphysics.

You, David, do not admit the distinction between what exists (present tense) and what exists simpliciter.  For you, 'exists simpliciter' collapses into 'exists' (present tense).  

You then return to the truthmaker objection. It seems to me quite natural and unproblematic to say that the past both had a share in reality and has been reduced to nothing. Problems only appear when we say the past both has a share in reality and has been reduced to nothing.

BV:  But of course I don't say that. It is contradictory to say that the past has a share in reality and has been reduced to nothing.  I say that there are very good reasons to hold that the past is not nothing, that is is real (actual, not merely possible; factual not fictional) but merely lacks temporal presentness.

Suppose that a certain building B has been completely demolished. On your view B has been reduced to nothing.  All will agree that B is now nothing. But you want to say more. You want to say that what is now nothing is nothing sans phrase (without qualification). You want to say that what is nothing now is nothing without any temporal qualification.   Can you prove that?  Can you refute the view that wholly past items, which by definition are nothing now, have (tenselessly) a share in reality?  Can you prove that the past -- past times, past events, processes, continuants, etc. -- are simply nothing as opposed to nothing now?  

The past is arguably actual, not merely possible, and factual, not fictional. If so it is (tenselessly) real, and therefore not nothing. The passage of time does not consign what has become wholly past to nothingness.  Can you refute this view? I grant that it has its own problems. The main problem, as it seems to me, is to specify what it means to say that a temporal item -- an item in time -- exists tenselessly. 

My view is that these problems about the relation of time and existence are genuine but insoluble. Your view, I take it, is that the problems are pseudo-problems susceptible of easy dissolutions if we just adhere to ordinary ways of talking.

Have I located the bone of contention? Or have I 'dislocated' it? (A pun I couldn't resist.)

The Gist of Brightly's Presentism

An excerpt from a comment by David Brightly  to this entry:

My mind is populated with ideas of things. I acquire these ideas (a) directly through acquaintance with external objects and (b) indirectly by description in language and image. These ideas of things guide my interaction with the outside world. Having seen a bear go into the cave or having been told 'There's a bear in the cave', I approach the cave with caution. Through my contact with the external world I come to accept that all external things come into existence, exist for a while, and then pass out of existence. The ceasing to exist of things that I am familiar with and am attached to is an everyday experience. When I have such an experience, or have a thing's passing described to me, my idea of that thing becomes modified. None of the idea itself passes away, at least not initially. Instead the idea (not the thing it's an idea of) acquires a new attribute, analogous to the label 'Account Closed' on the front of a business ledger, signifying that, to a first approximation, the content of the idea can be safely ignored for purposes of guiding my life. I might express this label by saying 'The thing is past' or 'The thing is in the past' or 'The thing has ceased to exist'. The important point here is that, despite appearances, these assertions are not predicating something of the thing itself but rather of my idea of it, namely that the idea is redundant.

Suppose that a monument M, of which I had direct sensory acquaintance, has been demolished.  M no longer exists, but my memorial ideas, my memories, of M still exist. Consider the most vivid of these, idea R.  R is obviously distinct from M because R is a mental representation of M. R exists now 'in' my mind; M does not exist now, and, being a physical chunk of the external world, never existed 'in' any (finite) mind either spatially or merely intentionally. When I learn that M no longer exists, R undergoes a modification; it "acquires a new attribute" as David puts it.  This new attribute is not an attribute of M, which no longer exists, but solely an attribute of R.  We could describe this attribute as the property of not being of or about anything real or existent. It comes to the same if we call this attribute the property of being non-veridical. This simply means that R is not true of anything.  R has thus undergone a modification: it was veridical when M existed, but is now non-veridical when R no longer exists.  (In my example, R is a memory, but it might be a past-directed description, say, 'the only statue at the corner of Third and Howard.' 

You can see where David is going with this. He is proposing that we analyze 'M is (wholly) past, ' M is in the past,'  and 'M has ceased to exist'  in terms of 'R has ceased to be veridical.'  

One virtue of this analysis is that R is available, and available at present, which satisfies the demands of presentism according to which only what exists (present tense) exists.   But I don't think the analysis is workable even as a specification of truth conditions. The cup out of which Socrates drank the hemlock existed but no one now has any ideas about it, that very cup. And there are innumerable things that existed but no longer exist about which no one now or ever had any ideas whether singular or general.  What existed cannot depend for its having existed on the present contents of any finite mind.  But there is worse to come when we ask about truthmakers. 

If you are wondering what the difference is between a truth condition and a truthmaker, our old friend Alan Rhoda in an old blog post does a good job of explaining the distinction:

. . .truthmakers are parcels of reality . . . .

Not so with truth conditions. Truth conditions are semantic explications of the meaning of statements. They tell us in very precise terms what has to be true for a particular statement to be true. For example, a B-theorist like Nathan Oaklander will say that the truth conditions of the sentence "The 2006 Winter Olympics are over" is given by the sentence "The 2006 Winter Olympics end earlier than the date of this utterance". Thus truth conditions are meaning entities like statements that are used to spell out or analyze the meaning of other statements.

'M existed' is true, true now, and contingently true now (it might not have been true now and would not have been true now if the Antifa thugs hadn't dynamited the monument).  We have here a truthbearer that clearly needs a truthmaker.  So I ask a simple question of the presentist: What makes it true that M has ceased to exist? (In general: what makes any presently true, past-tensed, contingent truth true?)  The truthmaker cannot be or involve M because M, on presentism, does not exist.

Note that the truthmaker of 'M has ceased to exist' cannot be the fact that the memorial representation or idea R has ceased to be  veridical. This answer avails nothing since it merely postpones the question, which becomes: what makes it true that R has ceased to be veridical?  'R is no longer veridical' is true, presently true, and contingently true. It needs a truthmaker.    

If the presentist says instead that 'M has ceased to exist' had a truthmaker in the past, what makes true this tensed claim, namely, the claim that the truthbearer in question had a truthmaker in the past? 

Could past-tensed contingent truths be brute truths?  (A brute truth, by definition, has no need of a truthmaker.)   I may come back to this topic in a separate entry.  But if you grant me that the true, present-tensed, contingent 'BV is  seated' (assertively uttered at t) needs a truthmaker, then how could the mere passage of time do away with the need for a truthmaker of the presently true, contingent, past-tensed 'BV was seated' (assertively uttered at t* > t)?

Finally, the presentist might reject the need for any truthmakers at all.  I would respond by hitting him over the head with Aristotle's Categories, figuratively speaking of course.

More on the Reality of the Past: Reply to Brightly

 In an earlier thread, David Brightly offers the following penetrating comment:

My birth certificate purports to record the event of my birth which occurred on such and such a day to such and such parents, etc. For an event or process to exist is for it to be ongoing or occurring. So my birth, being wholly past, no longer exists. This does not mean it never occurred or never existed, just that the passage [of] time brought that event or process to an end. Bill would argue that if the passage of time annihilated my birth then my birth certificate would record nothing (no real event). This could only be true under a strict and literal interpretation of 'annihilation' as making a thing (and the world) as if [it] never existed. Elsewhere Bill calls this 'absolute annihilation'. It seems to me, however, that [E. J.] Lowe is operating with a weaker notion of annihilation as a bringing to an end---a mere ceasing to be rather than a ceasing to having been.

I too believe that the past is (was?) real, but I suspect my understanding of this claim differs from Bill's. Bill appears to contrast 'reality' with 'nothingness'. I contrast 'real' with 'imaginary'. We need to look into this difference of view. Arguably a blank birth certificate records no event. A falsified birth certificate records an event, but an imaginary or unreal one.

I will first summarize our points of agreement and then try to locate the bone of contention.

David and I agree about birth certificates. Some are blank, some are forged/falsified, and some record actual births, and in most cases wholly past actual birth events.  We agree that for an event or process to exist (present tense) is for it to be ongoing or occurring. We agree that there are events. We agree that some events no longer exist in the sense that they are not now occurring, but did occur.  We agree that there is an important distinction between what did exist and what never existed. (For example, Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen did exist whereas his marriage to her never existed.) And we both believe that the past is real. That is, we both assertively utter tokens of 'The past is real.' But I am pretty sure that the contents of our assertions, i.e., the propositions (thoughts) we assert when we make those assertions, are different. To anticipate, I believe that past items are real in that they exist simpliciter.  I suspect that David will balk at this and say that past items are real in that they existed, and leave it at that. I will explain existence simpliciter in a moment.

Note that when David informs us of his belief about the reality of the past, he  tellingly waffles in his formulation: "I too believe that the past is (was?) real . . . " David is trying to get by with ordinary tensed English. He senses, however, that to say that the past is (present tense) real is false, indeed, absurd (self-contradictory). Bear in mind that this discussion is about the reality of what is wholly past. Surely it would be absurd to say that what is wholly past is present. But if he says that the wholly past was real, then he says something tautological.  Of course the past was real.  If we stick with tensed English we won't be able to formulate the problem.

To locate the bone of contention in the philosophy of time over which presentists and 'eternalists' fight, we must navigate, if we can, between the Scylla of self-contradiction and Charybdis of tautology.   Mixed metaphors aside, the issue is whether the past exists simpliciter. When I say that the past is real, I mean that past items exist simpliciter. I do not mean that past items exist now -- which would be self-contradictory -- or that they existed -- which  would be trivial. What I mean, and what the dispute is about, cannot be understood without this notion of existence simpliciter. And the issue is meaningful only if this notion is meaningful. So what is existence simpliciter?

E. J. Lowe's (correct) answer is that to exist simpliciter is to be a part of reality as a whole. (Monist article, 284) To deploy a Jamesian trope, to exist simpliciter is to be part of the "furniture of the world." Or you could say that to exist simpliciter is to be listed in the final ontological inventory.  Equivalently, to exist simpliciter is to be in the range of our logical quantifiers when they are taken 'wide open.'  To exist simpliciter is simply to exist.  Existence simpliciter abstracts from when an item exists if it exists in time, and indeed whether an item is in time at all. 

So the issue cannot be whether the wholly past is real or was real.  The issue is whether the wholly past exists simpliciter.  Presentists deny this. They maintain that, with respect to temporal items, everything that exists simpliciter exists at present, and thus that nothing non-present exists simpliciter.  (The present in question is what William James calls  the "specious" or short-term present.) The presentist thesis is not trivially true. It is not the thesis that  whatever exists (present tense) exists (present tense). That is of course true, but of no philosophical interest. Presentism is the metaphysically substantive claim that whatever exists simpliciter exists (present tense).  And of course the converse holds as well for the presentist: whatever exists (present tense) exists simpliciter. Presentism is a biconditional thesis. 

David needs to tell me whether he accepts the notion of existence simpliciter.  It is of course not my invention but is  standard in the literature.  David also needs to tell me whether he agrees with me that the thesis of presentism cannot even be formulated without the notion of existence simpliciter.  By  'presentism' I of course intend a metaphysically  substantive thesis about the 'relation' of time and existence, not the mere tautology that whatever exists (present tense) exists (present tense) and such related trivialities as 'What no longer exists did exist but does not exist' and 'What still exists, did exist and exists (present tense).'    

Let us now consider a concrete example, Winston Churchill.  The gross facts or Moorean data are not in dispute. WC existed, but does not now exist.  So far, no metaphysics. Just ordinary tensed English, and a bit of uncontroversial historical knowledge.  Reflecting on the data, we note that some of what is said now about WC is true, and some false.  WC is now the logical subject of both true and false predications (predicative statements).  And this despite the fact that WC does not now exist. At this point a philosophical problem arises for the presentist. On presentism, only that which presently exists exists simpliciter. What did exist and what will exist does not exist simpliciter. How can something that does not exist simpliciter be the logical subject of such presently true past-tensed  contingent affirmative statements  as 'WC smoked cigars'? This is the question to which presentism has no good answer.  It would be a very bad answer to say that the past-tensed sentence is true now because WC existed.  For on presentism, WC is nothing; he is not just nothing now -- which is trivially true -- but simply nothing, i.e., nothing simpliciter. And if WC is simply nothing, then he is not 'there' (read existentially, not locatively) to be the logical subject of predications.  I am assuming the following principle. 

Veritas sequitur esse. (VSE) Truth follows being in the sense that, necessarily, if a statement about a thing is true, then that thing exists simpliciter. There are no truths about nonexistent 'things.'  I take the principle just enunciated to be very secure, epistemically speaking, though not self-evident. (Meinong did not find it self-evident; indeed he rejected it.)  Accepting the VSE principle as I do, I say that WC exists simpliciter and that therefore presentism is false.

What then are David and I disagreeing about? We agree that WC is actual, not merely possible, and real as opposed to fictional/imaginary.  So there is a clear sense in which we both accept the reality of the past. The difference between us may be that David hasn't thought through what it means to say of a past item that it is real.  He contents himself with platitudes.  No doubt WC is real as opposed to imaginary or fictional. But what is it to be real given that (a) WC is wholly past and that (b) presentism is true?

E. J. Lowe's Presentism and the Reality of the Past

We lost the brilliant E. J. Lowe (1950-2014) at an early age. We best honor a philosopher by thinking his thoughts, sympathetically, but critically. Lowe writes,

When we say that Caesar has ceased to exist, what we really should mean is that he is no longer a part of reality at all, any more than Sherlock Holmes is, in fact, a part of reality . . . . This, of course, raises the question of how we can so much as talk about Caesar now that he no longer exists simpliciter -- how we can speak about 'that which is not.' It also raises the question of how we can still distinguish between the ontological status of Caesar and that of Holmes, and resist saying that Caesar has 'become' a fictional object in something like the sense in which Holmes is. But these questions are not, perhaps, so difficult to answer, once we understand aright the metaphysical picture that is being proposed. With regard to the second question, we can still say that Caesar really did exist, unlike Holmes. And with regard to the first, we can say that the proper name 'Julius Caesar' is perfectly meaningful, not because it now has an existing referent, but because its use is historically traceable back to a referent that did exist -- pretty much in line with the 'causal' theory of reference advanced by Saul Kripke. ("How Real is Substantial Change?" The Monist, vol. 89, no. 3, 2006, p. 285. Italics in original.)

What no longer exists did exist but does not now exist.  That's just what 'no longer exists' means. But is it true that what no longer exists does not exist at all? Lowe answers in the affirmative.  Of  course, what no longer exists does not exist now, but that is tautologically true and of no metaphysical interest.  Lowe is telling us something of metaphysical interest about time, existence, and their 'relation.' He is telling us that what no longer exists and is wholly past has been annihilated. Not only does a past item not exist now, it simply does not exist: it does not exist simpliciter as we say in the trade. It is no longer a member of the sum total of what exists. When a thing passes away it falls off the cliff of Being into the abyss of Nonbeing.  And so I cannot say, now and with truth, of Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) that he would have been 100 years old this year had he lived. But I just did! I referred to him successfully and I made a true statement about him, that very person. And what were the birthday celebrations in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts about if they were not celebrating his birth? However things stand with respect to the future, the past surely seems to have a share in reality.  If the past has no share in reality, what do historians study?  Will you tell me that they study the causal traces in the present of past events? But if the past has no share in reality, if the past is not, then those traces are traces of nothing, and the historian is not an historian but a student of some weird merely present things.  Will you tell me that the past WAS? Well, that's surely true, but not to the point. The question is whether what WAS has a share in reality as opposed to being annihilated, reduced to nothing, by the passage of time. 

In general, what should a Lowian presentist say about past-tensed contingent truths? There are plenty of them, whether we know them or not, and whether or not the things they are about have left any causal traces in the present.  And they are true now. It is the case that Julius Caesar was assassinated.  What makes it true now that Caesar was assassinated?  Surely nothing that now exists makes it true, and if only what exists now exists simpliciter, then nothing makes true contingent past-tensed truths.  Some say that such truths are brute truths: they are just true without anything that explains their being true, or that grounds their being true, or that 'makes' them true. This is a very bad answer as I could easily show; in any case it appears not to be Lowe's answer given his acceptance of truthmakers:

I should also reveal that I am an adherent of the truthmaker principle, according to which all truths -- all contingent positive truths -- require the existence of a truthmaker; something which, by existing, makes them true. (288, bolding added)

On the face of it, there is a tension, if not a contradiction, in Lowe's position. His presentism commits him to saying that nothing that now exists could serve as the truthmaker of a past-tensed positive (affirmative) truth such as the one expressed by 'Julius Caesar existed.' But if all contingent affirmative truths need truthmakers, as per the quotation, then so does the truth that Julius Caesar existed, in which case Lowe is telling us both that past-tensed truths must have, and cannot have, truthmakers.  That certainly appears to be a contradiction. Is there a way around it? For maximal logical clarity, I cast the puzzle in the mold of an aporetic triad:

a) All contingent affirmative truths need truthmakers.
b) 'Julius Caesar existed' expresses a contingent affirmative truth.
c) 'Julius Caesar existed' cannot have a truthmaker.

This trio is collectively inconsistent: its members cannot all be true. Since (b) records a pre-philosophical datum, it cannot be philosophically denied. (An historian might attempt to show it false, but then I would simply change the example.) So the question boils down to whether we accept the truthmaker principle as explained by Lowe (to which explanation I have no objection)  or accept instead Lowe's (non-ersatzist) presentism. (Lowe rejects ersatzism.) We cannot accept both, as Lowe appears to do.  Thus I smell a logical contradiction.  Or is this an olfactory hallucination on my part? 

Lowe tells us that the proposition that Julius Caesar exists "is now false but was once true." (289) For "it formerly had a truthmaker -- namely, Julius Caesar himself -- but no longer does." (289)  If a proposition can change its truth value from true to false, then, given the truthmaker principle, the proposition in question had a truthmaker, but has one no longer. Fine, how is this relevant? The question concerns the truthmaker of the proposition that Julius Caesar existed. The question is  not whether the proposition that Caesar exists had a truthmaker.  The question is: what makes it true that Caesar existed is true? What makes it true now that Caesar existed can't be the fact that Caesar exists had a truthmaker but has one no longer.  For what makes it true now that the proposition that Caesar exists had a truthmaker? Nothing at all if presentism is true. 

Lowe maintains that a truthmaker is "something which, by existing, makes them [positive contingent truths] true."  Truthmakers, then, must exist to do their jobs: there are no nonexistent truthmakers. But on presentism only what exists at present exists simpliciter. Wholly past truthmakers do not exist. So it is simply irrelevant to invoke them if the question concerns the truthmakers of presently true past-tensed truths.

As I see it, Lowe cannot  solve what is called the 'grounding problem,' a problem that ineluctably arises for him because of his (laudable) commitment to truthmakers.  The problem, simply put, is that past-tensed contingent affirmative truths (true propositions) need ontological grounds, i.e., truthmakers. He cannot solve the problem because of his creationist-annihilationist version of presentism.

I now turn to the other problem Lowe mentions in the passage quoted above, the problem of  referring to what no longer exists given the presentist view that what no longer exists does not exist at all.   Lowe tells us that "the proper name 'Julius Caesar' is perfectly meaningful, not because it now has an existing referent, but because its use is historically traceable back to a referent that did exist . . . ." Lowe mentions Kripke's causal theory of reference.  It is difficult to see how there could be any historical tracing if all of past history has been annihilated by the passage of time. 

More needs to be said. But brevity is the soul of blog, as some wit once opined.

Kamala Harris on the Passage of Time

We here at Maverick Philosopher are classically liberal in our openness to a variety of points of view on the enduring questions of philosophy.  As long-time readers know, one of our mottoes is Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus. "We consider nothing philosophical to be foreign to us."* 

In that spirit, we offer the profound thoughts of the Vice President, thoughts that rival in depth those of Aurelius Augustinus and John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, and that push the philosophy of time in a new direction and away from the notorious B-theory of time much loved by previous Veeps.

I will leave the reader to decide whether Kamala's insights reach the level of those proffered by President Bill Clinton some years ago when he breathed new life into philosophical logic with his penetrating observation that matters of great moment  often ride on what the meaning of 'is' is. 

___________________

*The motto is modelled on Terentius: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. "I am a human being; I consider nothing human to be  foreign to me." One also sees the thought expressed in this form:  Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. Our motto is based on this variant.  Horace Jeffery Hodges informs me of a Satanic variant to be found in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: "Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto." (I am Satan, and nothing human is foreign to me.) 

Between Time and Eternity

Tom O. asks,

How does one reconcile the temporal with the eternal, in a personal/spiritual or experiential manner? The political situation of our time strikes me as dire and incredibly important. Yet such things are transitory and will, ultimately, pass away, and so in another sense are not so important. I am torn between these two extremes on a daily basis. The latter is a source of hope and peace, the former a source of anxiety and unrest. Focusing more on one at the expense of the other seems to only intensify the problem, since doing that seems to downplay the importance of one of the extremes, when what I am after is a reconciliation of the two that does not dismiss or downplay either. But perhaps that goal itself is unattainable.

We are made for eternity, but we find ourselves in time. Both spheres are real and neither can be dismissed or pronounced unreal.  You and I agree on that.  You want a reconciliation of the two "that does not dismiss or downplay either" while suspecting that such a reconciliation is "unattainable."

Here I think lies the germ of an answer. One of the spheres needs to be "downplayed." For if there are these two spheres, they cannot be equally important. 

Why can't they be equally important?

Within time, we rightly value the relatively permanent over the relatively impermanent. We reckon him a fool who sacrifices a lifetime of satisfactions for a moment's pleasure.  John Belushi, for example, threw away his life and career for a ride on the 'Speedball Express.' Elliot Spitzer trashed his career and marriage to a beautiful  woman because he could not resist the siren songs of the high-class hookers. And then there is David Carradine who died of auto-erotic asphyxiation in Bangkok. Examples are easily multiplied beyond necessity. 

Infinitely more foolish is one who sacrifices an eternity of bliss for a lifetime of legitimate mundane satisfactions.  One who believes that both spheres are real, and thinks the matter through, ought to understand that the temporal is inferior to the eternal in point of importance.  That there are these two spheres is a matter of reasoned faith, not of knowledge.  (It is 'metaphysical bluster' to claim to have certain knowledge in this area. One cannot prove God, the soul, or man's eternal destiny. Or so say I; plenty of dogmatists will disagree.)

I therefore make the following suggestion in alleviation of my reader's existential problem. Devote the majority of your time and energy to the quest for the Absolute, but without ignoring the temporal. The quietist must needs be a bit of an activist in a world in which his spiritual life and quest is endangered by the evildoers in the realm of time and change.  

For spiritual health a daily partial withdrawal from society is advisable.  It needn't be physical: one can be in the world but not of it. 

A partial withdrawal can take the form of a holding free of the early morning hours from any contamination by media dreck.  Thus no reading of newspapers, no checking of e-mail, no electronics of any sort.  Electricity is fine: you don't have to sit in the dark or burn candles.  No talking or other socializing. Instead: prayer, meditation, spiritual and philosophical reading and writing, in silence, and alone.

So for a few pre-dawn hours each day you are a part-time monk.

The Tree and the House

A parable about envy.

Substack latest.  Opening:

A man planted a tree to shade his house from the desert sun. The tree, a palo verde, grew like a weed and was soon taller than the house. The house became envious, feeling diminished by the tree’s stature. The house said to the tree: "How dare you outstrip me, you who were once so puny! I towered above you, but you have made me small."

Is Presentism Common Sense?

Not by my lights. But then I might be a dim bulb. 

For Alan Rhoda,

Presentism is the metaphysical thesis that whatever exists, exists now, in the present. The past is no more.  The future is not yet.  Either something exists now, or it does not exist, period. 

This is my understanding of presentism as well. Rhoda goes on to claim that presentism is "arguably the common sense position."  I beg to differ. 

It is certainly common sense that the past is no more and the future is not yet.  These are analytic truths understood by anyone who understands English.  They are beyond the reach of reasonable controversy, stating as they do that the past and the future are not present.  But presentism is a substantive metaphysical thesis well within the realm of reasonable controversy.  It is a platitude that what no longer exists does not now exist.  But there is nothing platitudinous about 'What no longer exists does not exist at all, or does not exist period, or does not exist simpliciter.'  That is a theoretical  claim of metaphysics about time and existence that is neither supported nor disqualified by common sense and the Moorean data comprising it.  The presentist is making a claim about the nature of the existence of that which exists.  He is claiming that the existence of what exists either is identical to, or necessarily equivalent to, temporal presentness.  Is it not just common sense that common sense takes no stand on any such high-flying metaphysical thesis?

In the four sentences that begin his article, Rhoda has two platitudes sandwiched between two metaphysical claims.  This gives the impression that the metaphysical claims are supported by the platitudes.  My point is that the platitudes, though consistent with the metaphysical theory, give it no aid and comfort.

Compare the problem of universals:  It is a Moorean fact that my coffee cup is blue and that I see the blueness at the cup.  But this datum neither supports nor disqualifies the metaphysical theory that blueness is a universal, nor does it either support or disqualify the competing metaphysical theory that the blueness is a particular, a trope.  Neither common sense, nor ordinary language analysis, nor phenomenology can resolve the dispute.  Dialectical considerations must be brought to bear. It is common sense that things have properties.  That they are, common sense is equipped to establish; what they are, however, common sense leaves wide open.

It is the same in the philosophy of time. Dialectical considerations must be brought to bear. JFK existed. It is true now that he existed. Indeed, it is true now that he actually existed.  If there are merely possible past individuals, JFK is not one of them: he is an actual past individual.  What's more, JFK really existed: he existed outside of people's minds.  He was never imaginary or purely fictional.  If you meditate carefully on these points you should be able to appreciate how dubious, if not preposterous, is the claim that only what exists now exists simpliciter.  The past is not nothing; the past was.

The case against presentism is strong.  In fact, I hold that presentism cannot be true. Must I then be an 'eternalist'?  Why? Both positions might be untenable. And this could be case even if they are logical contradictories.  We would then be up against an aporia in the strict sense. But I don't go that far now.

Consider the gladiatorial combats in Rome. They are a thing of the past.  That is a truism. They are no longer occurring. That too is a truism. But to say, with the presentist, that what no longer occurs is nothing at all, is not truistic but highly dubious if not preposterous.  Or will you tell me that the historians of ancient Rome have no subject matter?  On the other hand, the battles are not still going on, the besotted Romans drunk with blood lust are not still roaring, the gladiators are not still expiring in anguish.  So in what sense are the gladiators, their doings and sufferings actual?  How can anything wholly past be actual?  How can an event such as a beheading, whose mode of being is to occur, and thus elapse over time, occur tenselessly or timelessly?

This is but a sketch of the intricacies of the dialectic that envelops the presentist and the eternalist. The 'present' point is that common sense plays no role in deciding between them. In particular, and pace my friend Alan Rhoda, presentism cannot rightfully draw upon the support of common sense.

 

Presentism and Evil: If Presentism is False, then God does not Exist

Bradley Schneider sent me the following argument and would like my opinion. I am happy to accommodate him. (I have edited his argument for the sake of brevity, the soul of blog. I have also given it a title.)

PRESENTISM FALSE? THEN GOD DOES NOT EXIST!

1)   An all-good, omniscient, omnipotent God should not allow any horrendous evil.

2)  If there is a solution to the problem of evil, it must entail that God eventually defeats evil and, to defeat evil, God must not only compensate the victims of evil but destroy evil's existence.  

3)  If presentism is not true, however, it means that past events still exist, even if they do not exist now.  

 

4)  But this implies that a horrendous evil that occurred in, say, 1994 (the Rwandan genocide, for example) still exists.  Not only that, it will always exist.  As will every other horrendous evil throughout human history.

5)  God may be able to vanquish evil at the eschaton, but all of the horrendous evils will persist throughout all eternity.  Even while the blessed are enjoying heaven, the horrendous evils will continue to exist.  All of the past evils will remain real and hence undefeated, even if God can assure that no further evil will occur post-eschaton.

 

6)  So God ultimately cannot vanquish evil if presentism is false.

 

7)  Therefore, God doesn't exist if presentism is false.

 

The problem is with (3).   If presentism is not true, then presumably eternalism is true. Presentism is the view that only  temporally present items (times, events, . . .) exist. That is, everything that exists exists at present.  On eternalism, this is not the case: past and future items also exist.  Now for these two views to be contradictory, 'exist(s)' must be used in the same sense. But what sense is that? It cannot be the present-tensed sense because that would reduce presentism to a tautology and eternalism to a contradiction. How so?

 

Well, 'Everything that exists (present tense) exists at present' is a trivial logical truth devoid of metaphysical import. On the other hand, 'Past, present, and future items all exist (present tense)' is logically contradictory since wholly past and wholly future items  are not temporally present.  Presentism and eternalism are substantive metaphysical theses that contradict each other only if 'exist(s)' is taken tenselessly.

 

Now glance back at (3).  It reads, in part, "If presentism is not true, however, it means that past events still exist . . . "  This is arguably a presentist misunderstanding of what the eternalist is saying.  'Still exists' means 'existed and exists (present tense).' That is not what the eternalist is saying. He is not saying, for example, that the gladiatorial combat in the Coliseum is still going on. He is saying that past events, i.e., events earlier than his speaking, exist simpliciter, i. e., tenselessly, whatever that comes to.

 

Note also that if past events still exist, then they do exist now, which contradicts the rest of (3): " . . . even if they do not exist now." 

 

So Schneider's argument needs some work.

 

My view is that both eternalism and presentism are fraught with insuperable difficulties. Using either for theological purposes is not likely to get us anywhere.

Presentism and Actualism: Tenseless Existence and Amodal Existence

The analogy between presentism and actualism has often been noted.  An unpacking of the analogy may prove fruitful if it doesn't perplex us further.  Rough formulations of the two doctrines are as follows:

P. Only the (temporally) present exists.

A. Only the actual exists.

Now one of the problems that has been worrying us is how to avoid triviality and tautology.  After all, (P) is a miserable tautology if 'exists' is present-tensed.  It is clear that the typical presentist does not consider the thesis to be a tautology. It is also clear that there is a difference, albeit one hard to articulate, between presentism and the various types of anti-presentism.  Consider the difference between presentism and eternalism. The presentist holds that only present items exist whereas the eternalist holds that past, present, and future items exist.  The disagreement obviously presupposes agreement as to what is meant by 'exists.'   There is a substantive metaphysical dispute here, and our task is to formulate the dispute in precise terms.  This will involve clarifying the exact force of 'exists' in (P).  If not present-tensed, then what?

A similar problem arises for the actualist.  One is very strongly tempted to say that to exist is to be actual.  If 'exists' in (A) means 'is actual,' however, then (A) is a tautology.  But if 'exists' in (A) does not mean 'is actual,' what does it mean? 

We seem to have agreed that Disjunctive Presentism is a nonstarter:

DP.  Only present items existed or exists or will exist.

This is equivalent to saying that if x existed or x exists or x will exist, then x presently exists.  And this is plainly false. Now corresponding to the temporal modi past, present, and future, we have the modal modi necessary, actual, and merely possible.  This suggests Disjunctive Actualism:

DA.  Only the actual necessarily exists or actually exists or merely-possibly exists.

This too is false since the merely possible is not actual.  It is no more actual than the wholly future is present.

We must also bear in the mind that neither the presentist nor the actualist intends to say something either temporally or modally 'solipsistic.'  Thus the presentist is not making the crazy claim that all that ever happened or ever will happen is happening right now.  He is not saying that all past-tensed and future-tensed propositions are either false or meaningless and that the only true propositions are present-tensed and true right now.  The presentist, in other words, is not a solipsist of the present moment. 

Similarly with the actualist. He is not a solipsist of this world.  He is not saying that everything possible is actual and everything actual is necessary.  The actualist is not a modal monist or a modal Spinozist who maintains that there is exactly one possible world, the actual world which, in virtue of being actual and the only one possible, is necessary.  The actualist is not a necessitarian.

There is no person like me, but I am not the only person.  There is no place like here, but here is not the only place.  There is no time like now, but now is not the only time.

In sum, for both presentism and actualism, tautologism, disjunctivism, and solipsism are out! What's left?

To formulate presentism it seems we need a notion of tenseless existence, and to formulate actualism we need a notion of amodal existence (my coinage).   

We can't say, on pain of tautology, that only the present presently exists, and of course we cannot say that only the present pastly or futurally exists.  So the presentist has to say that only the present tenselessly exists.  

What do I mean by amodal existence?  Consider the following 'possible worlds' definitions of modal terms:

Necessary being: one that exists in all possible worlds
Impossible being: one that exists in no possible world
Possible being: one that exists in some and perhaps all possible worlds
Contingent being: one that exists in some but not all possible worlds
Merely possible being: one that exists in some possible worlds but not in the actual world
Actual being: one that exists in the actual world
Unactual being: one that exists either in no possible world or not in the actual world.

In each of these definitions, the occurrence of 'exists' is modally neutral analogously as 'exists' is temporally neutral in the following sentences:

It was the case that Tom exists
It is now the case that Tom exists
It will be the case that Tom exists. 

My point, then, is that the proper formulation of actualism (as opposed to possibilism) requires an amodal notion of existence just as the proper formulation of presentism requires an atemporal (tenseless) notion of existence.

But are the atemporal and amodal notions of existence free of difficulty?  This is what we need to examine.  Can the requisite logical wedges be driven between existence and the temporal determinations and between existence and the modal determinations? If not then presentism and actualism cannot even be formulated and the respective problems threaten to be pseudo-problems.

The Future as the Most Completely Temporal of the Temporal Modi and the Least like Eternity

A tip of the hat to Brother Inky for reminding me of the following intriguing passage from C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters. The following is lifted verbatim from Powerline:

Another classic passage that bears on the essential maliciousness of the modern “Progressive” mind comes from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. If you’re not familiar with this work, it is the fictional ironic letters written to a junior officer in Satan’s army with instructions on how to corrupt the particular human assigned to this junior tempter. Although geared to higher spiritual matters, here and there are passages of great perception about modern ideology. Like this one from Chapter 15, which illuminates the malignancy of Progressivism’s fixation on “the Future” and the “side of history” that they always want to help move along at a faster pace:

Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. . . It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time — for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. Do not think lust an exception. When the present pleasure arrives, the sin (which alone interests us) is already over. The pleasure is just the part of the process which we regret and would exclude if we could do so without losing the sin; it is the part contributed by the Enemy, and therefore experienced in a Present. The sin, which is our contribution, looked forward.

To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too — just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is not straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future — haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth — ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other — dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

 

On the Consolations of Tense Logic

What has been, though it needn't have been, always will have been.  What time has mothered, no future time can touch.   What you were and that you were stand forever inscribed in the roster of being in indelible ink whether or not anyone will read the record.  And all your deeds and misdeeds with you. You will die, but your having lived will never die.  But how paltry the ersatz eternity of time's progeny!  Time has made you and she will unmake you.  In compensation, she allows your having been to rise above the reach of the flux.  Thanks a lot, bitch!  You are one mater dolorosa whose consolation is as petty as your penance is hard.

......................

The entry above, posted 10 March 2010, caught the sharp eye of Alan Rhoda who isolated the animating tense-logical principle:

You here express the tense-logical idea that p-->FPp, that if something is the case, then it will thereafter always be the case that it has been the case. In Latin, facta infecta fieri non possunt.

Believe it or not, this has been denied, by the famous Polish logician Lukasiewicz, no less. He seems to have accepted a version of presentism according to which (1) all (contingent) truths depend for their truth on what presently exists, and (2) what presently exists need not include anything that suffices to pick out a unique prior sequence of events as "the" actual past. Accordingly, truths about the past may cease to be true as the passage of time obliterates the traces of past events. Lukasiewicz apparently found this a comforting thought:

"There are hard moments of suffering and still harder ones of guilt in everyone’s life. We should be glad to be able to erase them not only from our memory but also from existence. We may believe that when all the effects of those fateful moments are exhausted, even should that happen only after our death, then their causes too will be effaced from the world of actuality and pass into the realm of possibility. Time calms our cares and brings us forgiveness." (Jan Lukasiewicz, "On Determinism" in  Selected Works, ed. L. Borkowski, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1970, p. 128.)

This is an amazing passage from Lukasiewicz both because of his denial of what strikes me and Rhoda as a self-evident axiom of tense logic and because of the  consolation he derives from its denial. (Is it really consolation if that from which it derives is false?)

I myself find it very hard to believe that there wasn't a unique actual past. And I find it impossible to believe that, with the passage of enough time, past events will somehow go from being actual to being merely possible.  

What Lukasiewicz is maintaining is really quite preposterous. He is saying, in effect, that a past-tensed truth such as 'Poland was invaded by Hitler's Wehrmacht on 1 September 1939,' which is true now, and was true at every time after the event, will  cease to be true in the future when all of the presently existing traces of the invasion have been  obliterated.  And surely such a time will come. When our sun goes supernova . . . .

Lukasiewicz is assuming that (a) contingent past-tensed truths need truth-makers, but (b) the only available truth-makers are presently existing causal traces of the events recorded by the past-tensed truths. (B) is a consequence of presentism, roughly, the view in the philosophy of time according to which the temporally present alone exists simpliciter, which implies that wholly past and wholly future times and events do not exist, and are now nothing at all.  If so, actual past events and merely possible past events are on an equal ontological footing.

But to me it seems obvious, a plain datum, that there is an importance ontological difference between a past event such as Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen, and a merely possible (past) event such as his marriage to her. Now that datum tells against presentism -- unless you bring God into the picture.

This is what Rhoda does in an excellent article of his, Presentism, Truthmakers, and God.

Abstract: The truthmaker objection to presentism (the view that only what exists now exists simpliciter) is that it lacks sufficient metaphysical resources to ground truths about the past. In this paper I identify five constraints that an adequate presentist response must satisfy. [. . .] Consideration of how these responses fail, however, points toward a proposal that works, one that posits God’s memories as truthmakers for truths about the past. I conclude that presentists have, in the truthmaker objection, considerable incentive to endorse theism.

But if we don't put God to work, or find other ways to supply presently existing truth-makers for past-tensed truths, and want to hold to presentism, then we are stuck with the preposterous view that the passage of time will not only erase individual and collective memory of past events, but will also erase the events themselves, and, to add to the absurdity, transform their modal status from actual to merely possible.

The past is a realm of fact, not fiction, actuality, not mere possibility. What was. actually was, and will remain actual even though it is no longer present.  The passage of time cannot alter the past.  You may hope that your transgressions will be forgotten, but one cannot reasonably hope that they will cease to be. The waters of Lethe merely hide the past from view; they do not undo the past.

As for consolation, I hope we can agree that a view's being consoling or the opposite is irrelevant to the question whether it is true.  If Lukasiewicz found consolation in his doctrine, that is no indicator of its truth since a doctrine doesn't have to be true  to be consoling.  It merely has to be believed. And if consolation were the touchstone of truth, then, the contradictory consolation deriving from p-->FPp would would cancel it out.

Ashes to Ashes; Dust to Dust

"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

Genesis 3, 19 is true whether or not God exists and whether or not man is spirit.  

The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence.  This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't.  If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist.  That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.  If our secularist is a leftist utopian, then he pins his hopes on developments no reasonable person could believe in, and that he won't be around to enjoy in any case.  His erasure of the historical record allows him to persist in his self-deception. The Left is at war with memory and its lessons.  

I will be coming back to this theme in connection with Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (Encounter Books, 2018). A quotation to tantalize: "Communism, as a system that started history anew, had to be, in essence, and in practice, against memory." (9)  We saw that play out in our cities last summer, as the Left stood idly by, and in many instances encouraged, the destruction of statues and other monuments for reasons that are no reasons at all but nihilistic ventings from the pit.

Our plesance here is all vain glory,
This fals world is but transitory,
The flesche is brukle, the Feynd is slee;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

No stait in Erd here standis sicker;
As with the wynd wavis the wicker,
Wavis this wardlis vanitie;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

(William Dunbar c. 1460 -- c. 1520, from "Lament for the Makers.")

Here lie I by the chancel door;
They put me here because I was poor.
The further in, the more you pay,
But here lie I as snug as they.

(Devon tombstone.)

Here lies Piron, a complete nullibiety,
Not even a Fellow of a Learned Society.

Alexis Piron, 1689-1773, "My Epitaph"

Why hoard your maidenhead? There'll not be found
A lad to love you, girl, under the ground.
Love's joys are for the quick; but when we're dead
It's dust and ashes, girl, will go to bed.

(Asclepiades, fl. 290 B.C., tr. R. A. Furness)

The world, perhaps, does not see that those who rightly engage in
philosophy study only death and dying. And, if this be true, it
would surely be strange for a man all through his life to desire
only death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it,
when it has been his study and his desire for so long.

Plato, Phaedo, St. 64, tr. F. J. Church

Of Time, Annihilation, and the Reality of the Past

This is the third in a series on Lowe's presentism.  It has two prerequisites. Here is the first entry; here is the second. 

We have seen that for E. J. Lowe, temporal passage is real, objective, mind-independent. Temporal passage "consists in the continual coming into and going out of existence of entities . . . ." ("Presentism and Relativity," 137)  Lowe insists more than once that the italicized phrases are to be taken seriously and literally: what passes out of existence is absolutely annihilated.  A thing's ceasing to be present, and becoming (wholly) past is an existential change that reduces the thing to utter nonexistence.

What Lowe is telling us is that a correct metaphysics must take the ordinary language locution 'ceases to exist'  to mean that what becomes wholly past becomes nothing at all. It cannot be taken to mean that what has become wholly past exists in some sense but at an earlier temporal location.   For if that were so, the wholly past would not be absolutely annihilated. Similarly with other ordinary language expressions such as 'no longer exists.'  For Lowe, what no longer exists is nothing at all. It has been annihilated by the passage of time.

One ought to find this puzzling. Scollay Square, to invoke my favorite example, did exist, and we know that it did. We also know that what did exist is different from what never existed.  That is an obvious distinction that must be accommodated by any adequate theory of time.  Can Lowe accommodate it?

Perhaps we can make some headway with this question by distinguishing between absolute and relative annihilation.

AA.  X is absolutely annihilated by the passage of time iff  said passage brings it about that x ceases to exist in such a way that after x ceases to exist there is no distinction between x's having existed and x's never having existed.

RA. X is relatively annihilated by the passage of time iff said passage brings it about that x, upon ceasing to exist, is nothing now or at present.

It seems to me that (AA) is what we ought to mean when we speak of absolute annihilation.  For what the phrase suggests is a reduction to nonbeing that is unconditional. Absolute annihilation is the ultimate in annihilation.  Imagine that there are no constraints, logical or non-logical, on divine power: God can do anything. If so, he can bring it about that Socrates never existed despite his having existed.  God would then have the power, not to re-write history, but the power to 're-write' that of which history is the record.  That would be a type of absolute annihilation.

Of course, I am not saying that God has this power, or that the passage of time has this power.  I am not even saying that it is really possible that anything have this power of absolute annihilation. To the contrary!  Given that Socrates existed, I say that there is no power on earth or in heaven that can 'undo' this fact.   (Similarly for his having drunk the hemlock: given that he drank hemlock, there is no power that can bring it about that he never drank hemlock.) All I am saying is that (AA) is what we ought to mean by 'absolute annihilation' if we are to use that phrase seriously and precisely.

Given the above definition of 'absolute annihilation,' I say to Lowe: the passage of time, which we assume is mind-independently real in opposition to all B-theories of time, does not have the power of absolute annihilation; it has only the power of relative annihilation.  I say this because I take it to be a non-negotiable datum that (i) what did exist is different from what never existed, and (ii) what did exist cannot be retroactively consigned to absolute nonexistence, and (iii) what ceases to exist, when it ceases to exist, does not become something that never existed.   (Corollary: when a contingent being, and thus a possible being, ceases to exist, it does not, upon ceasing to exist, become an impossible being.)

So all Lowe is entitled to say is that what ceases to exist is relatively annihilated by the passage of time: said passage brings it about that the thing, upon ceasing to exist, is nothing now or at present.  It is nothing now, but it was something yesterday, and so it cannot be the case that it is now nothing at all. It retains some sort of reality. It is difficult to say exactly in what the reality of the past consists; but the past is real.  Lowe cannot accommodate the reality of the past.

The Argument Summarized

1) What was is not the same as what never was.
2) The wholly past was. 
Therefore
3) It is not the case that the wholly past never was. (1,2)
4) If temporal passage brings about the absolute annihilation of the present and its contents, as per (AA), then it is the case that the wholly past never was.
Therefore
5) Temporal passage does not bring about the absolute annihilation of the present and its contents. (3, 4)
Therefore
6) Lowe's presentism is untenable: it is not the case that what passes out of existence is absolutely annihilated.
7) On the other hand, if the passage of time effects merely a relative annihilation of the present and its contents, as per (RA), then triviality results: if a thing, ceasing to exist, is relatively annihilated, then the thing is now nothing.  But this is trivially true.  If what exists, exists now, then the wholly past, which by definition does not exist now, does not exist.
Therefore
8) Lowe's presentism is either untenable or trivial.

The Presentism of E. J. Lowe: Summary

This entry is Part One of a multi-part attempt to understand and evaluate the late E. J. Lowe's 'untimely' version of presentism.  It is 'untimely' in that he resists what he takes to be the reification of time and times, and because his presentism is very different from its contemporary competitors. I am basing my interpretation mainly on "Presentism and Relativity: No Conflict" in Ciuni, et al. eds., New Papers on the Present (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 2013, 133-152) and on "How Real is Substantial Change," The Monist, vol. 89, no. 3 (2006), 275-293. Page references in parentheses refer to the first article unless otherwise noted. All emphases are in the original.

1) Lowe insists on "The ontological primacy of present reality and the objective status of temporal passage." (133)  These commitments justify calling him a presentist.

2) But he "repudiates [what he takes to be] the reification of time and 'times,' including the 'present moment' . . . ." (133) To reify is to treat as real what is not real. Lowe appears to be saying that there are no such items as times, and thus no such item as the present time. If so, one cannot quantify over times.  This would seem to scotch fairly standard definitions or definition-schemata of 'presentism' along the following lines:

(P1) Always, only present items exist.

That is: every time is such that only what is non-relationally present at that time exists simpliciter. 

3) The focus for Lowe is not on the present moment, but on the "fundamental reality of change . . . ." (133)

4) Change, however, is in every case "existence change -- that is, the coming into or going out of existence of entities of one kind or another . . . ." (133) We are being told that all change is existential or substantial change.  (See The Monist article cited above.) Now one kind of change is qualitative change as when a tomato goes from being green to being red.  This can be understood to be a species of existence change if properties are assayed as  tropes. The greenness trope in the tomato goes out of existence and  a redness trope comes into existence while the tomato stays in existence.  On this way of thinking, both the coming into existence of the tomato and its change of color are existential changes.

5) Objects (individual substances) change, but there are no events in addition to these changes.  We need only the object and its tropes: we need no events such as the event of a leaf's turning brown. Furthermore, there is no event of a trope's going out of existence or coming into existence.  If there were, a vicious infinite regress would ensue. (150) Events are "shadows cast by language rather than fundamental ingredients of temporal reality." (151) There are changes, but no events. I take Lowe to be saying that an event is an (illicit) reification of a change.  If an animal dies, there is no such event as the animal's death in addition to the dead animal. There is just the animal which ceases to exist. (137)

6) Because there are no events, change cannot be ascribed to events. Because there is no such entity as my birth, my birth has no properties such as occurring at a certain place or being past.  Because there are no events, no events change in their A-determinations, their monadic (non-relational) pastness, presentness, and futurity.  There is thus no event, my birth, that was once future, then present, then past, and then ever more past. To think otherwise is to confuse events with objects, which amounts to a reification of events, an illicit treatment of them as if they are objects when all they could be are changes in objects.

7) It is not just that nothing has A-determinations; there are no such determinations to be had. McTaggart's A-determinations  are pseudo-properties based on a "false analogy between events and objects." (136)  There are no times, no events, and no A-determinations. This puts paid to McTaggart's claim that the A-series is contradictory, which is a key lemma in his overall argument for the unreality of time.  That lemma requires that there be events and A-determinations.  Very roughly, what McTaggart argues is that time is unreal because (i) time requires the A-series, but (ii) said series is contradictory in that each event has all three of the A-determinations. D. H. Mellor is a contemporary philosopher of time who accepts McTaggart's argument against the A-series, but concludes, not that time is unreal, but that time is exhausted by the B-series.

8) But if there are no events, then there is no B-series either. There is no series of events ordered by the so-called B-relations, earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with.  This puts paid to the view of D. H. Mellor and others that real time (to allude to the title of Mellor's book) is exhausted by the B-series.  For Lowe, then, there are no times, no events, no A-series, and no B-series.

9) For Lowe, time is objectively real; it is not unreal as on McTaggart's view, nor is it in any sense   transcendentally ideal (Kant) or constituted in consciousness (Husserl).  But it is not real in the manner of a container or a dimension.  Time is just temporal passage.  Since time is objectively real, temporal passage is also objectively real and in no way mind-dependent.  Temporal passage "consists in the continual coming into and going out of existence of entities . . . ." (137) Lowe is referring to temporal entities only, those that are not timeless such as propositions. He has in mind objects (individual substances) such as a cat and its properties (assayed as tropes) such as being asleep.  This ceaseless existential change is what temporal passage consists in. In sum, for Lowe, time = temporal passage = the ever ongoing creation and annihilation of entities.

As I read him, Lowe is not maintaining that to exist = to be temporally present tout court, but that for temporal items, to exist = to be temporally present. This makes him an existence presentist with respect to temporalia. Recall that for Lowe, all change is existential (substantial) change. See (4) supra. 

10) We tend to think of time as the dimension of change, a fourth dimension in addition to the three spatial dimensions.  We tend to assume that "time is a dimension in which reality as a whole is extended." (Monist, 283)  If you think that objects persist by perduring, by having different temporal parts at different times, then you are making this assumption.  But most, though not all, endurantists make the same assumption when they say that an object endures by being 'wholly present' at each time at which the object exists. Lowe denies that time is a dimension. For if there are no times ordered by the B-relations, earlier and later, then time is not a dimension. Reality is not temporally extended.  Lowe seeks to uphold an endurantism that does not presuppose that time is a dimension.

11) Lowe's view of time is thoroughly dynamic by contrast with the static character of time on eternalism, and with the partially static and partially dynamic theories of Growing Block and Spotlight.  The reality of time "consists simply in the reality of change . . . . (140)  The latter "constitutes" temporal passage.  This of course implies that without change, there is no time; but we can live with that.  What's more, there are no events and there are no times, and so there is no present time.  Lowe concludes that we need no account of what times are, and in particular, no "ersatzist" account of time in terms of abstract objects such as propositions. He is opposing views like that of Craig Bourne, for whom "a time is a set of propositions that states the other truths about what happens at that time." (A Future for Presentism, Oxford UP, 2006, 52.)

12) The view that all change is existential change commits Lowe to the view that properties of things in time are not universals but tropes or modes (particularized properties). These are not temporal parts of objects.  (141) Tropes are therefore consistent with endurantism.  Suppose that a changes from being F at t1 to G at t2.  "We can continue to say that a itself exists at both t1 and t2 despite having no temporal parts, thus being, in that sense, 'wholly present' at both of these times." (141) I note in passing how Lowe helps himself to talk of times. 

13) The object that has tropes is neither a bundle of tropes not a bare particular or substratum that supports them. The 'relation' between an object and its tropes is left unclear. (141).

14)  Objects persist through changes in intrinsic properties. How? Change in intrinsic properties occurs when "monadic tropes"  successively "come into and go out of existence while it (the object) stays in existence." (142)

15)  Lowe's presentism: "When 'time passes' the content of reality itself changes -- entities come into and go out of existence." This is intended "literally and absolutely." Going out of existence is absolute annihilation. (146)  But then coming into existence would have to be creation out of nothing, would it not?

16) Yet "some things that exist today already existed yesterday." (146) For example, the very same person who exists and is 'wholly present' now also existed and was 'wholly present' yesterday. (146)

17) Only present objects and tropes exist.  The sum-total of these entities is ever changing. What ceases to be present is annihilated. But not everything that exists at present is annihilated at the same time.  Suppose Elliot, who was drunk yesterday, is sober today.  Elliot yesterday co-existed with a D-trope, and Elliot today co-exists with an S-trope. The tropes, however,  are not coexistent with each other since the D-trope was annihilated by the passage of time while the S-trope presently exists. Lowe's presentism thus implies the non-transitivity of co-existence. It also implies that, while temporal reality is ever created and annihilated by  the passage of time, not everything is annihilated or created at the same time.  The annihilation of Elliot's drunkenness left Elliot the object unscathed. 

Presentism and Eternalism: A Substantive Difference?

A reader is convinced by my arguments against presentism and eternalism but is not convinced that there is a genuine issue in dispute. He further suspects that the parties to the dispute are using 'exist(s)' in different ways. The reader issues a serious challenge. Can I meet it?

Presentists and eternalists give competing answers to Quine's question, "What is there?" Roughly, presentists maintain that only  present items exist, whereas eternalists maintain that past, present, and future items exist.  The dispute concerns the ontological inventory. It is essential to observe that the disagreement presupposes a prior agreement as to how 'exist(s)' is to be used.  It obviously cannot be used in the present tense. If it is, then both presentism and eternalism turn out to be trivial theses, presentism trivially true, and eternalism trivially false. (We have gone over this many times.)

So let me introduce the sign 'exist(s)*' to denote existence simpliciter. The dispute is then whether what exists* is restricted to what is present or is not so restricted.  This strikes me as a substantive difference.  The views are in genuine conflict. It is as genuine a conflict as that between those who say that only particulars exist* and those who say that both particulars and universals exist*.  The dispute is about what exists simpliciter, i.e., what exists*. 

Another example. Suppose on Monday morning you take delivery of 300 paving stones. By  Friday evening, you have made a walkway out of them. Do you now have 300 + 1 new things on your property or only 300?  Does the walkway count as something in addition to the paving stones? Some say yes. Other say no: you have 300 stones arranged walkway-wise. This is an ontological inventory dispute, a dispute about what exists.  It is arguably genuine -- but only if  there is agreement as to the sense of 'exist(s).'

Quine famously told us that "Existence is what existential quantification expresses." ("Existence and Quantification" in Ontol. Rel., 97) To put that with all due scrupulosity, we must rewrite it as "Existence* is what existential quantification expresses."   Equivalently, existence simpliciter is what existential quantification expresses. Uncle Willard takes his quantifiers 'wide open,' or unrestricted. They range over whatever there is, whether abstract or concrete , universal or particular, past, present, or future. On he same page, Quine offers his definition of singular existence: a exists =df (∃x)(x = a). 

Suppose my reader agrees with the above.  He might still feel that there is no real difference between presentism and eternalism, that the metaphysical difference is not a difference that makes a (practical) difference.  The reader may be reasoning as follows: since the presentist and the eternalist accept all the same Moorean facts, there is no substantive difference between the positions.

Consider first the past. Among the gross facts not in dispute is the truth of

1) Scollay Square no longer exists.

What this says using tensed language is that

1T) Scollay Square existed but Scollay Square does not exist.

In tenseless language it goes like this:

1U) Every time at which Scollay Square exists* is a time earlier than the present time.

The reader may claim victory at this point. "You see? Two different ways of saying the same thing, a presentist way and an eternalist way. Hence there is no substantive difference between the two views."

But now consider the future. Here a substantive difference emerges. Suppose Dave is a father whose kids are slackers who may or may not procreate, but haven't done so yet.  If they do, then Dave will have one or more grandchildren.  If they do not, then Dave will have no grandchildren.   On presentism, future temporal items do not exist* which implies that neither of the following is now true:

2) Dave will have a grandchild

and

~2) Dave will not have a grandchild.

On eternalism, however, future temporal items exist* so that one of the above propositions is now true.  On eternalism, the future is as fixed as the past, whereas on presentism, the past alone is fixed.  This is a substantive difference and not a difference in two ways of saying the same thing.

RELATED:  Peter Unger on the Emptiness of the Presentist-Eternalist Debate

Reductive Presentism and the Truth-Value Links

What renders a statement about the past true? On one version of presentism, nothing does: statements about the past are brute truths. A rather more plausible version holds that "whatever renders a statement about the past true must lie in the present." (Michael Dummett, Truth and the Past, Columbia UP 2004, 75)  Craig Bourne labels this view "reductive presentism." (A Future for Presentism, Oxford UP 2006, 47 ff.)  But it too is untenable for various reasons, one of which is that it "conflicts with the truth-value links which assuredly govern our use of tensed statements." (ibid.) Dummett continues:

Such a truth-value link requires that if a statement in the present tense, uttered now, of the form "An event of type K is occurring," is true, then the corresponding statement in the past tense, "An event of type K occurred a year ago," uttered a year hence, must perforce also be true. (ibid.)

Suppose I now scratch my right ear and intone 'I am now scratching my right ear.'   If precisely a year later I were to say, 'I scratched my right ear exactly a year ago,' I would say something true. "But it might well be that in a year's time you would have forgotten that trivial action, and that every trace of its occurrence would have dissipated." (ibid.)  But then on reductive presentism, my statement, 'I scratched my right ear exactly  a year ago' would not be true.

It would not be true because there would be nothing presently in existence to render it true. No  memory, no video-taped recording, no causal trace whatsoever.

Presentism: Safe Passage between Tautology and Absurdity?

Can presentism navigate between the Scylla of tautology and the Charybdis of absurdity? Let's see.  We begin with a datum, a given, a Moorean deliverance that I think most would be loath to deny:

DATUM: if it is true that a was F, or that a F'ed, then it was true that a is F, or that a Fs.

For example, if it is true that John F. Kennedy was in Dallas on 22 November 1963, then it was true on that date that he is in Dallas on that date.  For a second example, if it is true that Socrates drank hemlock, then it was true that Socrates drinks hemlock.

It follows that the present present cannot be the only present: there had to have been past presents, past times that were once present. For example there was the present when JFK was assassinated. That is a past present. Only what was once present could now be past. Suppose you deny this. Then are you saying that there are past items that were never present.  But that cannot be right. For the past is the present that has passed away.  It cannot be the case that the event of Kennedy's assassination was always past and never present.  There was a time when it was present and a time before that when it was future. When Kennedy was inaugurated, his assassination was future; when Johnson was sworn in, his asassination was past.

Bear in mind that presentism is an A-theory.  This implies that among times there is a  privileged time that is absolutely or non-relationally present.  So while every time is present at itself, only one time is present absolutely. This time instantiates the monadic (non-relational) property of absolute temporal presentness.  This absolute property is temporary, not permanent. 

So what is the presentist maintaining? He cannot be maintaining that

P-Taut: Only present items presently exist

for this is not a substantive metaphysical claim contradicted by the eternalist's  substantive denial, but a mere tautology. Nor can he be telling us that

P-Solip: Only presently present items exist simpliciter.

For this is solipsism of the present moment, a bizarre if not lunatic thesis. It amounts to the claim that all that ever existed, all that exists, and all that will ever exist exists now, where 'now' is a rigid designator of the present moment, the moment at which I am writing and you are reading.  If our presentist pals are not solipsists of the present moment, then they cannot be saying that only what exists at the present present exists simpliciter, and so they they must be telling us that only what exists at a given present (whether past, present, or future) exists.  Thus

P-Always: At every time t, only what is present at t, exists simpliciter.

This seems to do the trick.  What is says is that, at every time t, only what is temporally present at  t belongs in the ontological inventory, the catalog of what there is.

Thinking a little deeper, however, (P-Always) seems contradictory: it implies that at each time there are no non-present times and that at each time there are non-present times. For if one quantifies over all times, then one quantifies over present and non-present times in which case there are all these times including non-present times. But the bit following the quantifier in (P-Always) takes this back by stating that only what is present at a given time exists simpliciter.

It is obvious that (P-Taut)  and (P-Solip) are nonstarters.  So we are driven to (P-Always).  But it is contradictory. The presentist wants to limit the ontological inventory, the catalog of what exists, to temporally present items.  To avoid both tautology and the solipsism of the present moment, however, he is forced to admit that what exists cannot be limited to the present. For he is forced to quantify over times that are not present in order to achieve a formulation that avoids both (P-Taut) and (P-Solip).

The presentist needs the 'always' to avoid Scylla and Charybdis, but it doesn't keep him from drowning. He is forced to jump out of his privileged temporal perspective from within time and view matters sub specie aeternitatis. He is forced into an illict combination of a privileged perspective within time with a view from No When, a view from outside of time.  The perspectives cannot be integrated, and therein lies the root of the problem.

My interim conclusion is that presentism makes no clear sense.  This does not support eternalism, however, for it has its own problems. 

"History is written by the victors."

The cynicism of the saying presupposes the reality of the past.

Being and Time: Another Presentist Puzzle

One type of presentism makes a double-barreled claim about the Being of all beings:  All beings are (i) in time (ii) at the present time. There is nothing 'outside' of time, and the there is nothing 'outside' of the present time.  To be just is to be temporally present.  Being = Presentness.  Since identity is symmetrical, the property identity proposition expressed by the immediately preceding sentence  does not fully convey what I want to convey.  What I want to convey is that Being reduces to Temporal Presentness on the type of presentism now being considered.   (If A reduces to B, it does not follow that B reduces to A.)

The presentism under discussion is involved in a double restriction:  Items in general are restricted to temporal items, and then temporal items are restricted to present items. And all of this as a matter of metaphysical necessity.

What then do we say about the Berlin Wall? It is wholly past. Being past, it is in time. For, by definition, an item is in time just in case it is the subject of a temporal predicate, whether a monadic A-determination, or a relational B-property.  The Wall is the subject of the predicate 'past', which is true of it; ergo, the Wall is in time.  To put the point B-theoretically, the Wall is such that, every time at which it existed is a time earlier than the present time. Ergo, the Wall is in time.

On the other hand, being past, the Wall is nothing. Presentism implies that the passage of time has consigned the Wall to the abyss of nonbeing. For if Being reduces to Presentness, and an item is wholly past, then said item is nothing. But if the Wall is nothing, then it has no properties, including the monadic property of being past, and the relational property of being earlier that the present, whence it follows that the Wall is not in time.

So the Wall is both in time and not in time. It is in time, because 'wholly past' is true of it.  It is not in time for the reason given in the immediately preceding paragraph.

Presentism, as a thesis about the very Being of all beings, restricts everything to the present time, including the temporal modes, past and future. In so doing, presentism negates itself by eliminating time. For there is no time if there are no distinctions among past, present, and future.

Statements about the Past: Troubling for Presentism

1) There are statements about the past, and some of them are true. 'Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald' is a true statement about the past. In particular, it is a true statement about the wholly past individuals, Ruby and Oswald.

2) It is true now that Ruby killed Oswald and it was true at every time later than the time at which Ruby killed Oswald. That Ruby killed Oswald is a past-tensed truth true at present.

3) On presentism, the (temporally) present alone exists and "the past, as the past, retains no existence whatever . . . ." (Michael Dummett, Truth and the Past, Columbia UP, 2004, p. 52) 

4) That Ruby killed Oswald is not about anything that exists at present. This is because Ruby and Oswald are wholly past individuals.

5) That Ruby killed Oswald is not about anything at all. This follows from (3) and (4).  So much the worse for presentism unless it can find a way to uphold and do justice to the reality of the past.

6) At this point, one might insist that past-tensed truths are brute truths, where a brute truth is a contingent truth that requires nothing external to it for its being true.  A brute truth is just true, and that's all she wrote.  The truth expressed by the present-tensed 'Tom is smoking' presumably cannot be brute since it requires, for its being true, Tom himself at a bare minimum.  For if Tom does not exist, then 'Tom is smoking' cannot be true.  But it is true, and it is true of Tom, so Tom exists.  Here is a clear case in which truth supervenes on being, or veritas sequitur esse.  Aristotle makes this point in the Categories at 14b15-22.

The notion that Socrates is seated cannot be a brute truth, but that Socrates was seated can be a brute truth, cannot be credited. But I won't argue this out for it is not my present topic.

7) The present topic is a different way out of the difficulty, call it the Way of Surrogacy.  What the presentist tries to do is to find something in the present that can deputize for the wholly past item, a temporally present surrogate item that can ground the being-true of the past-tensed truth. 

8) There is more than one way to proceed.  One way is to appeal to causal traces in the present of the past events or individuals. For example, we have video footage of Ruby shooting Oswald, and this evidence is corroborated by eye witness accounts recorded in documents presently available. So the causal traces in the present include video footage, still photographs, copies of same, as above, memories, documents, the gun, etc. That the shooting issued in a killing, is shown by other evidence available at present.

So  one could say, with some plausibility, that the reality of the past is preserved in the present by the effects (causal traces) in the present of the past events/individuals.  But of course there is much more to the past than is recorded in the present.  But I won't pursue this line of critique at the moment.

9) I will mention a different problem with this view.  When I assert that Ruby killed Oswald, I am making an assertion about those individuals themselves.  I am not talking about anyone's memories of them, or photographs of them, or video footage of them, or anything else.  I am not referring to things present, but to things past. The very sense of 'Ruby killed Oswald'  rules out anything present being what the sentence is about. It is about wholly past individuals.

Suppose I show you a photograph. I say, "This is my long-dead father." You reply, "So you were sired by a photograph? What you want to say is that this is a photograph of your father."  You learn something about the appearance of a wholly past man by studying a present photograph. 

Of course, the photograph shows what the man looked like, not what he looks like. But repeating this platitude does not to blunt the point that the dead man must in some sense exist if he is to be an object of ongoing study via photographs and other documentary evidence, not to mention exhuming the poor guy and studying his teeth and bones.

Scollay Square is wholly past. But there are plenty of pictures of it. By studying these pictures one can learn a lot about Scollay Square itself.  The ultimate object of study is SS itself, not the evidence by means of which we infer truths about SS. Now if an historian learns more and more about Scollay Square by studying evidence in the present, how can it be maintained that such wholly past items as Scollay Square are now nothing at all?

Existence is Tenseless

The Ostrich inquires,

You hold that [instances of] both (1) and (2) below are true.

               (1) X is no longer temporally present and (2) X exists tenselessly.

Fair enough. But what does ‘exist tenselessly’ mean?

To exist tenselessly is just to exist. To exist is to be something. More precisely, it is to be identical to something or other:

Q. Necessarily, for any x, x exists iff for some y, y = x.

For example,

a. Quine exists iff Quine = Quine.

Now is (a) true at all times, or only at some times? At all times. For at no time is Quine self-diverse.  This commits me to the affirmation of permanentism and the denial of transientism:

P. It is always the case that everything in time exists at every time.

T. Sometimes something begins to exist, and sometimes something ceases to exist.

Now if nothing begins to exist and nothing ceases to exist, then the A-determinations (pastness, presentness, and futurity) are purely temporal and not at all existential. This is why, from

b. The Berlin Wall is no longer present

one cannot validly infer

c. The Berlin Wall does not exist.

Although nothing begins to exist and nothing ceases to exist, some items begin to be temporally present and some items cease to be temporally present.

Now presentism includes transientism.  Having rejected transientism, I must also reject presentism, the view that it is always the case that whatever exists exists at present.

Is it a substantive metaphysical question whether permanentism or presentism is true?  I should think that it is. It is a question about the nature of existence: Is existence time-independent or not?    

Ostrich on a Ridge

I bring an ostrich to a high and narrow and slippery ridge.  I bid him consider the abyss to his left and the abyss to his right.

"You came from nothing to perch here a moment, but soon you will slide to your left and become nothing again. I speak in a parable to convey to you the truth of presentism: the present alone is real.  What is not yet is not; what is no longer is not.  Now is the time, transient as it is. No nunc stans for you; the nunc movens is all you've got."

An Exchange on the Reality of the Past

I wrote:

Our penal [and other] practices presuppose the reality of the past. But how can presentism uphold the reality of the past?  The past is factual, not fictional; actual, not merely possible; something, not nothing. 

The past is an object of historical investigation: we learn more and more about it.  Historical research is discovery, not invention.  We adjust our thinking about the past by what we discover. It is presupposed that what happened in the past is absolutely independent of our present thinking about it.

In sum, historical research presupposes the reality of the past. If there is a tenable presentism, then it must be able to accommodate the reality of the past.  I'd like to know how.  If only the present exists, then the past does not exist, in which case it is nothing, whence it follows that it is no object of investigation. But it is an object of investigation, ergo, etc.

David Brightly responds:

History, archaeology, palaeontology investigate not so much the past but vestiges (from vestigium, footprint or track) of the past. Things from the past that are not wholly past, such as documents, artifacts, and fossils that have come down to us. These things are sometimes hidden away in archives and attics, or under the soil, or in rock strata, and have to be discovered. But then comes a process of invention whereby a story about the past is put together that must be consistent with the found vestiges. Sometimes the account is revised in the light of new discoveries. Such an account may well contain truths but we cannot be sure. We can't acquaint ourselves with the wholly past.

We of course agree that the practitioners of the above disciplines study the causal traces of the past in the present. Since we cannot travel back to the past, the only accessible evidence, whether archaeological or documentary, is all in the present. The researchers then infer from present evidence various facts about the past.  "But then comes a process of invention whereby a story about the past is put together that must be consistent with the found vestiges."  That seems right.  We can also agree that any account/story of the past is subject to revision in light of new discoveries. 

Here are some points of possible disagreement.  If the reader disagrees, he should tell me about what and why.

1) Although we write history, the subject-matter written about is independent of us and what we write. Similarly, although we in the present remember some past events, the past events we veridically remember (as opposed to merely seem to remember) are typically if not always independent of us and our veridical memorial acts.  So, while without us there would be no history of the past, the past itself does not need us to exist.   (Compare: without us there would be no physics; but nature does not need us to exist.) To put it another way, the past is not immanent in our historiography; it is not 'constituted' (Husserl) by our historiography or by our collective memory.  Affirming this, I affirm the reality of the past, and deny anti-realism about the past.

2) While the (partially invented) story must be consistent with the evidence discovered, and consistent with itself, it cannot be both true of historical facts and complete.    Either Big Al drank a glass of vino rosso  on January 1st, 1940, or he did not.  But there is nothing in the present that could either confirm or disconfirm the proposition or its negation.  Whatever effects Big Al's drinking or non-drinking had surely had petered out by the end of 1940.  The past is complete (completely determinate). It is as complete as the present. But no true account we give could be complete. 

3) While our account of the past is subject to addition and revision, the past itself is not.  It is not only determinate in every detail, but also fixed and unalterable.  Although the past's events are logically contingent, they have a kind of accidental necessity (necessitas per accidens) inasmuch as neither man nor God can do anything to alter or expunge them. Not even God can restore a virgin, as Aquinas says somewhere.  What is done is done, and cannot be undone.  J. Caesar might not have crossed the Rubicon, but, having crossed it, he couldn't uncross it.

Now how can presentism accommodate these points? How can presentism uphold the reality of the past?

a) On presentism, whatever remains of the past must be locatable in the present. For on presentism, the present and its contents alone exist.  It follows that past events for which there are no causal traces in the present are nothing at all.  On presentism, what no longer exists, does not exist at all.  It does no good to say, with the Ostrich, that what no longer exists existed, for on presentism, what existed is nothing if it cannot be found in some form in the present. 

b) Most past events leave no causal traces in the present.  Therefore:

c) The  totality of causal traces  of the reality of the past in the present is incomplete.

d) The past is complete. Therefore:

e)  The past cannot be identified with  the totality of its causal traces in the present. Therefore:

f) Presentism cannot accommodate the fully determinate (complete) reality of the past. Therefore:

g) Presentism is false.

 

Presentism, Punishment, and the Past

One man steals from another. The thief is caught, the thievery is proven, and the penalty required by law is demanded.  It turns out that the thief's attorney is a philosophy Ph.D., a presentist in the philosophy of time, who could not find a job in academe. So he went to law school, and here he is in court. He argues on behalf of his client that, since the present alone exists, the past and its contents do not exist. So the act of thievery does not exist. 

Now a  person cannot be justifiably punished for what he does not do.  Since the act of thievery, being wholly past, does not exist, the criminal case against the man in the dock should be dismissed.  A man cannot be justifiably punished in the present for nonexistent past deeds any more than he can be punished in the present for nonexistent future deeds. Or so argues the defense.

The prosecutor, who is also a presentist, objects that, while the particular act of theft in question does not exist, it did exist, and that this past-tensed truth suffices to render the punishment just.  Both defense and prosecution agree that the past-tensed truth that Smith stole Jones' car is a brute truth, that is, a contingent truth that has no truthmaker, no ontological ground of its being true. 

The defense attorney replies that the past-tensed truth, being brute and groundless, is just words, an empty representation that does not  represent anything, and this for the simple reason that the event does not exist.  He adds that a man cannot be justifiably punished because of a string of words, even if the words form a sentence, and even if the sentence is true.  For if there is nothing in reality that makes it true, the brute truth's being true is irrelevant.  The defense further argues that a contingent sentence that lacks a truthmaker cannot even be true.

Our penal practices presuppose the reality of the past. But how can presentism uphold the reality of the past?  The past is factual, not fictional; actual, not merely possible; something, not nothing. 

The past is an object of historical investigation: we learn more and more about it.  Historical research is discovery, not invention.  We adjust our thinking about the past by what we discover. It is presupposed that what happened in the past is absolutely independent of our present thinking about it.

In sum, historical research presupposes the reality of the past. If there is a tenable presentism, then it must be able to accommodate the reality of the past.  I'd like to know how.  If only the present exists, then the past does not exist, in which case it is nothing, whence it follows that it is no object of investigation. But it is an object of investigation, ergo, etc.

Continuing the Discussion of Time, Tense, and Existence

This just in from London.  I've intercalated my responses.

Here is another take. We agree on our disagreement about the following consequence

(A)  X is no longer temporally present, therefore X has ceased to exist.

You think it is not valid, i.e. you think the antecedent could be true with the consequent false. I think it is valid.

BV: Yes. So far, so good. 

However regarding

          (B) X is no longer temporally present, therefore X does not still exist

we seem to agree. We both think the antecedent cannot be true with the consequent false.

BV:  Right.  For example, we agree BOTH that the Berlin Wall is no longer temporally present (and is therefore temporally past) AND that the Berlin Wall does not still exist.  I should think that we also, as competent speakers of English, agree that locutions of the form 'X still exists' are intersubstitutable both salva veritate and salva significatione with locutions of the form 'X existed and X exists' where all of the verbs are tensed and none are tense-neutral or tenseless. Agree?  My second comment has no philosophical implications.  It is merely a comment on the meaning/use of a stock English locution.

My puzzle is that my reading, and I think a natural reading, is that (A) and (B) mean the same, because “X has ceased to exist” and “X does not still exist” mean the same. You clearly disagree.

BV:  If we stick to tensed language, then 'X has ceased to exist' and 'X does not still exist' mean the same.  So I don't disagree if we adhere to tensed language. But note that 'X has ceased to exist' is ambiguous as between

a) X has ceased to presently-exist (or present-tensedly exist)

and

b) X has ceased to be anything at all (and thus has become nothing at all).

For example, the Berlin Wall has ceased to presently-exist.  But it doesn't follow that said wall has become nothing, that it is no longer a member of the totality of entities, that it has been annihilated by the mere passage of time.  If you think that it is no longer a member of said totality, then you are assuming presentism and begging the question against me.  You have restricted the totality of what exists to what presently exists. Note that I do not deny that one can move validly from the premise of (A) to its conclusion if one invokes presentism as an auxiliary premise. My claim is that the inference fails as a direct or immediate inference.

I think you want to argue that there is a covert tensing in “X does not still exist” which is absent in “X has ceased to exist”, which (according to you) is tenseless. But how? Doesn’t the verb ‘cease’ always imply a time at which X ceased to exist? Would it make sense to say that 2+2 has ceased to equal 4? How?

BV: In 'X does not still exist,' 'exist' is present-tensed.  But 'X has ceased to exist' is ambiguous as explained above . It can be read your tensed way, but it can also be read in my tenseless way.  Surely you don't want to say that 'exists' has exactly the same meaning /sense as 'exists-now' or 'exists' (present tense).  We could call that semantic presentism. I don't think anyone is a semantic presentist.  And for good reason. You, as a nominalist, will not countenance abstracta such as numbers and sets and the other denizens of the Platonic menagerie. But you understand what you are opposing when you oppose their admission into our ontology in the Quinean sense (our catalog by category of what there is).  And so you understand the notion of tenseless existence and tenseless property possession as when a 'Platonist' says that 7 is prime. The copula is tenseless, not present-tensed.

So, in summary, my problem (and I am always seeing problems) is how you think (A) and (B) differ.

Over to you.

BV: The Boston Blizzard of '78 was one hell of a storm. When it ended, did it cease to exist? Yes of course, if we are using 'exist' in the ordinary present-tensed way. The storm because wholly past, and in becoming wholly past it stopped being presently existent. Obviously, nothing can exist at present if it is wholly past.  And it is quite clear that what no longer is present is not still present, and that what no longer presently exists is not still presently existent.

So far, nothing but platitudes of ordinary usage.  Nothing metaphysical. 

We venture into metaphysics when we ask: Does it follow straightaway from the storm's having become wholly temporally past, that it is nothing at all?  I say No. If you say Yes, then you are endorsing presentism, a controversial metaphysical theory. 

You can avoid controversy if you stick to ordinary language.  If you have trouble doing this, Wittgensteinian therapy may be helpful.

Once More on Becoming Past and Becoming Nothing

I maintain that in the following conditional, the consequent (2) does not follow from the antecedent (1).

(*) If (1) X ceases to be temporally present by becoming wholly past, then (2) X ceases to exist.

The Londoner replies

You claim that the truth of the antecedent (1) is consistent with the falsity of the consequent (2), i.e. consistent with X not having ceased to exist. But that claim implies that both “X still exists” and “X has ceased to exist” could be false.

I don’t follow.

Consider a spatial analog. I am in a meeting with some people. I then leave the room.  In so doing I cease to be spatially present to those people and the space they occupy.  But no one will conclude that I have ceased to exist by leaving the room.

Why not?  Well, where a thing is has no bearing on whether it is.  If you can grasp that, then it ought to be at least conceivable that when a thing is has no bearing on whether it is.  And if that is conceivable, then you ought to be able to grasp that (2) does not follow from (1).  An item can become wholly past without prejudice to its existence.

Now obviously 'existence' here refers to tense-free existence. That the Londoner is not grasping this is shown by his use of 'still exists.'  The claim is not the logically contradictory one that an item that has become wholly past still exists. For if a thing still exists, then it exists (present tense).  The claim is that it is conceivable that what has become wholly past has not been annihilated: it has not become nothing.  For (2) to follow from (1), presentism would have to be brought in as an auxiliary premise. But on presentism, that which has become wholly past has become nothing at all.

Does when a thing is determine whether it is?  This is not obvious.  For it could be -- it is epistemically possible -- that when a thing is has no bearing on whether it is. Two views. On one view, temporal location determines whether or not a thing is or exists.  Presentism is one type of this view.  On presentism, all and only that which is located in or at the temporal present exists.  This implies that items not so located -- those that are wholly past or wholly future -- do not exist.

On the second view, temporal location does not determine whether or not a thing is or exists.  'Eternalism' as it is known in the trade -- the term is a bit of misnomer but let that pass -- is a type of this view.  On eternalism, past, present, and future times and the items at those times (e.g. events) all exist equally, i.e., in the same sense of 'exists.' 

Now it should be perfectly obvious that this sense must be tense-neutral, or tense-free, or tenseless.  And I have no desire to paper over the considerable problems that arise when we try to specify exactly what this tense-neutral use of 'exists' comes to. But that is not our present topic.

Becoming Past and Becoming Nothing

Londoner in Lockdown writes,

I am still puzzling about the connection between your

(1) X ceases to be temporally present by becoming wholly past.

and

(2) X ceases to exist.

I think I understand (2). It means that there was once such a thing as X, but there is no longer such a thing as X.

But what does (1) mean? Does it mean what (2) means? In that case, (2) indeed follows from (1).

But you can't have intended that. So what do you mean by (1)?

Perhaps a spatial analog of (1) will help convey what I mean:

1*) X ceases to be spatially present by becoming wholly elsewhere.

Now (1*) is not idiomatic English, but the thought is clear.  And the thought is trivially true. Suppose the boundaries of the spatially present are given by the dimensions of my lot.  So when I say 'here' I refer to the area of my lot together with all its sub-areas. Suppose a  cat that is wholly within the boundaries of my lot trespasses onto your adjacent lot thereby becoming wholly elsewhere. Max was wholly here in my yard, but now he is wholly there in yours.  Spatial translations such as this one typically occur without prejudice to the existence of the moving item. Thus the cat does not cease to exist by moving from my property onto your property.  (Nor does the cat suffer any diminution of its degree of existence, if there are degrees of existence, or any change in its mode of existence, if there are modes of existence.)

In short, Max the cat exists just as robustly  in your yard as in mine.  Spatial translation is existence-neutral.  No one is a spatial presentist. No one holds that all and only what exists here, exists. 

Surely it is conceivable -- whether or not it is true -- that becoming wholly past is existence-neutral. It is conceivable that something that becomes wholly past not be affected in its existence by its becoming wholly past.  On this understanding of (1), (1) does not straightaway -- i.e., immediately, without auxiliary premises -- entail (2).  (1) and the negation of (2) are logically consistent.

Now if you insist that (1) entails (2), then I will point out that this is so only if you assume that all and only the temporally present exists.

Do my sparring partners now see that there is a genuine question here?  The question is whether it makes sense to maintain that, among the items that exist in time, some are non-present.  I say that it does make sense, whether or not in the end it is true; consequently, tenseless theories of time cannot be simply dismissed out of hand.  A corollary of this is that presentism is not obviously true, or even more outrageously,  a matter of common sense as some have the chutzpah to say. 

A Time Puzzle for a Couple of Londinistas in Lockdown

I don't expect ever to change the minds of Messrs. Brightly and Buckner on any of the philosophical questions we discuss, but it may be possible to isolate the sources of disagreement. That would count as progress of a sort.

Suppose that

1) X ceases to be temporally present by becoming wholly past.

Does it follow that

2) X ceases to exist?

YES: For an item in time to exist is for it to be temporally present. So when an item in time become wholly past it literally passes away and ceases to exist.

NO: What ceases to exist becomes nothing. Boston's Scollay Square, which is wholly past, is not nothing.  One can refer to it; there are true statements about it; some have veridical memories of it; there are videos of interviews of people who frequented it; it is an object of ongoing historical research. To dilate a bit on the fifth point:

One cannot learn more and more about what is no longer (temporally) present if it is nothing at all. Only what exists can be studied and its properties ascertained.  But we do learn more and more about Scollay Square. So it must be some definite item.  But, pace Meinong, there are no nonexistent items. Therefore, Scollay Square exists non-presently.  Therefore, what ceases to be present, does not cease to exist. It exists despite being past. It exists tenselessly at times earlier than the present time.  The mere passage of time did not annihilate Scollay Square.

I incline toward the negative answer. But it rests on certain assumptions. Suppose we list them.

A1. There are no modes of existence. In formal mode, 'exist(s)' is univocal in sense across all contexts.  So we cannot say that what ceases to be present exists, but  in the mode of pastness.

A2. There are no degrees of existence.  So we cannot say that what ceases to be present exists, but to a lesser degree than what presently exists.

A3. There are no Meinong-type nonexistent items. So we cannot say that what ceases to be present becomes nothing: it is a definite item but a nonexisting one.

I suspect that my London sparring partners will accept all three assumptions.

Perhaps the Londoners will reject both answers and with them, the question. Maybe one or both of them will give this little speech:

Look, you are just making trouble for yourself. You speak English and you understand how its tenses work. Why not just use them?  Scollay Square no longer exists. You know what that means. It means that it existed but does not exist now. Just leave it at that. If you stick to ordinary language you will avoid entangling yourself in pseudo-problems.

Tenselessness as Disjunctive Omnitemporality?

There is presentism about existence and presentism about what exists. We have been discussing the latter.

The presentist about what exists seems forced to agree with the eternalist that existence by its very nature is tenseless and not tense-dependent. It seems that he must so agree if his thesis is not to be a tautology. For if the presentist holds that all and only what exists now exists now, then he asserts a merely logical truth, one to which the eternalist will readily assent. So he has to say that all and only what exists simpliciter exists now.

To exist simpliciter is to exist actually, not merely possibly, in a non-tense-dependent way, that is, to exist tenselessly. But what is it for a temporal item to exist tenselessly? It cannot be to exist timelessly for the simple reason that temporal items, items in time, are not timeless items, items outside of time. 

(That the number 9, a timeless item, tenselessly exists and tenselessly instantiates such properties as being odd, is not particularly problematic, if you grant that numbers are denizens of the Platonic menagerie. And the same goes for the property of being odd.)

A natural suggestion is to say that a temporal item exists tenselessly just in case it either existed, or exists now, or will exist. But on this disjunctively omnitemporal analysis of tenselessness, presentism about what exists comes out false! Our presentist is then saying that all and only what existed, or exists now, or will exist, exists now. But this is false because, for example, Kepler existed but does not exist now.

I have made two main points.

First, the very formulation of a non-tautological version of presentism about what exists requires that the second occurrence of  'exists' in the formula 'Only what exists now exists' be read tenselessly.

Second, tenselessness cannot be understood as disjunctive omnitemporality.

So what is it for a temporal item to exist tenselessly?  If no good answer can be given, then we won't know what we are affirming when we affirm either presentism or one of its competitors.

I hope the reader appreciates that I am not attacking presentism in defense of one its competitors.   I am not a partisan in the 'time wars.' I stand above the fray like a good aporetician in keeping with the Maverick method. My aim is to lend credence (though not to prove) that, while the underlying problems are genuine, and important, they are insoluble. None of the extant theories, and indeed no possible theory our minds can construct, is a solution.

Do Past-Tensed Truths Need Truthmakers?

Cyrus wrote in an earlier thread,

In the linked article, you write:

That (some) truths refer us to the world as to that which makes them true is so obvious and commonsensical and indeed 'Australian' that one ought to hesitate to reject the idea because of the undeniable puzzles that it engenders. Motion is puzzling too but presumably not to be denied on the ground of its being puzzling.

But I question whether the scope of the “some” (that is, the scope of the obviousness and commonsensicality) extends to past tensed truths. I don't find it obvious that past tensed truths have truthmakers. Presumably presentists who reject it also don't find it obvious. (Some find it obvious that the past doesn't exist.) I guess what I'm asking is: Is there an objective way to measure obviousness? If there isn't, how much should we really be relying on it in our arguments?

That's a good comment and a good challenge. As Hilary Putnam once said, "It ain't obvious what's obvious."  So I don't think there is any objective way to measure obviousness, or, to use a better term, objective self-evidence. Nevertheless, I will die in the ditch for the first of my italicized sentences above. Surely there is at least one truth that cannot just be true, but needs a truth-ground that exists and indeed exists extramentally and extralinguistically. For example, 'BV is seated.'  That cannot just be true. It cannot be a brute truth. I have gone over this so many times I'm sick of it.  So let's move on.

Cyrus supra is not questioning whether there are truthmakers, nor is he raising the question as to the nature of truthmakers, i.e., the question of the category of entity to which they belong (Armstrongian states of affairs? tropes? etc.); he is raising the question whether past-tensed truths need truthmakers. I grant that the answer is not obvious.

One thing we should be clear about is that presentists needn't deny that past-tensed truths need or have truthmakers.  For they could hold, as some have held, that these truthmakers exist at present.  On presentism, whatever exists in time exists at the present time.  This is not the tautology that whatever exists (present tense) exists (present tense). This trivial truth is contested by no one. What the presentist is maintaining is that only what exists (present tense) exists tenselessly.  Presentism about what exists  in time is a restrictionist thesis: it restricts what tenselessly exists in time to what presently exists, i.e. what exists at present, or now.  (Note the ambiguity of 'presently' in ordinary English: if I say that I will visit you presently, that means in ordinary contexts that I will visit you soon, but not now.)

So we can divide presentists who accept truthmakers in general into two groups. Group One is composed of those who hold both that some past-tensed and some present-tensed truths have truthmakers, and Group Two is composed of those who accept that there are past-tensed truths but hold that they are all brute truths.

This is the view that I will try to argue against.  But first we need to lay another assumption on the table

I assume that there are past-tensed truths. For example, I assume that it is true, and indeed true now, that JFK was assassinated and that Socrates taught Plato.  (But don't get hung up on these examples: I could use different ones.) One might deny these (datanic) points in two ways. One could assert that all past-tensed truth-bearers are false. Or one could assert that no past-tensed truth-bearer is either true or false. For now we set these (lunatic) views aside.

The assumption, then, is that there are past-tensed truths.  The question is whether any of them need truthmakers given that present-tensed truths need truthmakers.

It is contingently true that I am alive. This is not a brute truth. Its truth requires, at a minimum, the existence of the living animal that wears my clothes. It is also true that after I am dead it will be true that I was alive today. If the first truth is not brute, how could the second truth be brute? The first truth is about me. It says that BV is alive. The second truth is also about me. It says that it will be the case that BV was alive. Now a proposition cannot be about a thing unless the thing exists. So in both cases the thing, me, exists. So both truths are grounded by my existence. If <I  am alive> asserted by me today has an ontological ground, and it clearly does, then <BV was alive> asserted after I am dead by a descendant also has an ontological ground. The two propositions differ merely in tense. Does that difference make a difference with respect to truth-making? It is not clear that it does. It is plausible to hold, with T. Merricks, that if presentism is true, then all truths about wholly past items are brute truths. Should we affirm the antecedent and infer the consequent by modus ponens? Or should we deny the consequent and deny the antecedent by modus tollens? It is not clear. The arguments appear to be equally good and cancel out. This is so given that the truth-makers of past-tensed truths about wholly past items cannot be located in the present. Perhaps some can be so located, but not all.

My interim conclusion is that presentism  is open to serious objection.  The fact that 'eternalism' is also is no good reason to accept presentism.

Presentism and the Determinacy of the Past

On presentism, the present alone exists, and not in the trivial sense that the present alone exists at present, but in the substantive sense that the present alone exists simpliciter.  But if so, then the past is nothing, a realm of sheer nonbeing. But surely the past is not nothing: it happened, and is in some sense 'there' to be investigated by historians and archeologists and paleontologists. 

If our presentist cannot accommodate the reality of the past, then his position is hopeless. He might say this:  the past is real, but its reality is wholly contained in the present.  The causal traces of past events in the present constitutes the entire reality of the past.  Will this work? No. There simply aren't enough causal traces!

On the principle of bivalence, every proposition is either true, or if not true, then false. Given that bivalence holds for what presently exists, it is difficult to see how it could fail to hold for what did exist. Why should the present, which is wholly determinate, become less than wholly determinate when it becomes past? However things stand with the future, one reasonably views the past as a realm of reality and thus as wholly determinate.

Our knowledge of the past is spotty, but not the past itself. It was, and I would add: it actually was. When a thing passes away it does not pass from actuality to mere possibility; it remains actual, though no longer temporally present. Or so it would seem if we are realists about the past. The historian studies past actualities, not past possibilities.

Compare Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen to his marriage to her. There is a loose sense in which both events belong to the past. It is clear that he was engaged to Olsen. We also know that he did not marry her. But he might have. This possible event belongs to the past in the sense that, had it been actual, it would have belonged to the actual past. The crucial difference is that the first event actually occurred while the second was a mere possibility. This is a difference that an adequate philosophy of time must be able to accommodate.

To make a slogan out of it: the past is fact, not fiction; actuality not possibility.

One point to keep in mind is that if the past is wholly determinate, as determinate as the present, this is the case whether or not determinism is true. The determinate is not to be confused with the determined. (Bourne 2006, 50 f.)

Consider the proposition that my grandfather Alfonso drank a glass of dago red on New Year's Day, 1940. Bivalence ensures that the proposition is either true or false but not both. If the proposition is true and the event occurred, it doesn't matter whether the event was caused by prior events under the aegis of the laws of nature, or not. To say that the past is determinate is not to say that past events are determined; it is to say that, e.g., the past individual Alfonso V. cannot be such that he neither drank nor did not drink red wine on the date in question. It had to be one or the other if bivalence holds for the past.

Of course, no one now remembers whether or not this event occurred, and there is no written record or other evidence of the event's having occurred. If the event occurred, nothing in the present points back to it as to its cause. Some past events, states, individuals, and property-instantiations leave causal traces in the present, but not all do. My grandfather's gravestone and the dessicated bones lying beneath it are causal traces in the present of a long-dead and wholly past individual. But there is nothing in the present that bears upon the truth of the proposition that Big Al drank a glass of vino rosso on New Year's Day, 1940, assuming it is true. If true, it is true now but lacks a present truth-maker.

So it looks as if our presentist is in a serious bind. The following cannot all be true:

1) Presentism is true: whatever exists at all, exists at present.

2) The past is real.

3) The past is determinate.

4) There are countless events that really happened that no one remembers and for which there is not a shred of evidence in the present.

It seems to me that the obvious solution to this aporetic tetrad is to deny (1).

Comments enabled, but no comment will be allowed to appear that does not address the above argument.

Presentism and Regret

I have done things I regret having done.  Regret is a past-directed emotion by its very nature. One cannot regret present or future actions or omissions.  So if I regret action A, A is wholly past.  What's more, I cannot regret a non-existent action.  But on presentism, all items in time are such that they exist at present.  Therefore, presentism is false.  

1) There exist states of regret.

2) Every such state has as its accusative an event that exists.

3) Every such state has as its accusative an event that is wholly past.

Therefore

4) There exist wholly past events.

5) If presentism is true, then there exist no wholly past events.

Therefore

6) Presentism is false.

Doesn't this argument blow presentism clean out of the water?  It is plainly valid in point of logical form. Which premise will you deny?

"You're begging the question! You are using 'exist(s)' tenselessly.  But on presentism, the only legitimate uses of 'exist(s)' are present-tensed."

Reply:  Please note that you too must use 'exist(s)' tenselessly to formulate your presentist thesis on pain of your thesis collapsing into the miserable tautology, 'Whatever in time exists (present-tense) exists (present-tense).'  That's fake news. To advance a substantive claim you must say, 'Whatever in time exists simpliciter exists at present' where 'simpliciter' is cashed out by 'tenselessly.'

Comments enabled, but no comment will be allowed to appear that does not address the above argument.

Presentism and the Cross

Alexander Pruss argues:

1) It is important for Christian life that one unite one’s daily sacrifices with Christ’s sufferings on the cross.

2) Uniting one’s sufferings with something non-existent is not important for Christian life.

3) So, Christ’s sufferings on the cross are a part of reality.

4) So, presentism is false.

The Prussian argument is an enthymeme the tacit premise of which is

0) On presentism, only temporally present events exist or are real.

Add the above to your Holy Saturday meditations.

Time and the Existing Dead

Another round with David Brightly.  My responses are in blue.

Bill says,

We don't want to say that a dead man becomes nothing after death since he remains a particular, completely determinate, dead man distinct from others. If the dead become nothing after death then all the dead would be the same. If your dead father and your dead mother are both nothing, then there is nothing to distinguish them.

It's difficult to know what to make of this.  My guess is that Bill is conflating a thing with the idea of a thing. 

BV: I plead innocent. I hope David doesn't think that when a person dies, that person becomes an idea.  My veridical memories of my dead mother are memories of a woman not an idea.

First, 'particular' and 'completely determinate' do not denote properties of  concrete objects like men.  One can contrast 'I have in mind a particular man' with 'I have in mind a man' but 'particular' here qualifies not 'man' but rather the way of having in mind.  'Completely determinate' functions in a similar way.  What would 'partially determinate man' denote?  A partially determinate idea of a man makes sense, however; we know some of his properties but not others. 

BV: I beg to differ. Granted, my idea of David is incomplete: I know some of his properties but not others. But David is not the same as my idea of him, and that's a good thing for both of us. I say that David himself is complete (completely determinate), just like everything else that exists mind-independently.  It makes sense to say both that my idea of David is incomplete, and that David himself is complete.  The fact that there cannot be an incomplete man cannot be used to show that 'complete' cannot be a predicate of concrete items.  So why does David think that?

David may be relying on a Contrast Argument one form of which is as follows:

1) If a term T is meaningful, then there are items to which T does not apply.
2) There are no items to which T does not apply.
Ergo
3) T is not meaningful.

In the present case:

4) If 'complete' is a meaningful term, then there are concrete items to which 'complete' does not apply.
5) There are no concrete items to which 'complete' does not apply.
Ergo
6) 'Complete' is not a meaningful term.

Well, I reject Contrast Arguments. Bang on the link.  Similarly with 'particular.'  David appears to believe, pace Meinong, that there are no incomplete items in reality, and that all incompleteness is epistemic.  I think so too. But that is not the issue.  The issue is whether 'particular' and 'complete' can be predicated meaningfully of items like David and his dogs, or whether they qualify merely the way one has these things in mind.  He hasn't given me a good reason to change my view. 

Second, 'dead' is an alienating adjective.  If a man is a living thing and 'dead' means non-living, then a 'dead man' is a somewhat contradictory conception.  Better to think of 'is dead' as 'has died'.  A dead man is one who has passed through that final event that all living things inevitably come to, and has ceased to be. 

BV: Very tricky!  No doubt there are alienans adjectives (bang on the link), but is 'dead' (juxtaposed with 'man') one of them?  Clearly, a decoy duck is not a duck. But it is not clear that a dead duck is not a duck.  Now the corpse of a duck is not a duck.  But if your pet duck Donald dies you can still utter truths about him and have veridical memories of him. Those truths and memories are about a duck that has died, a particular duck, not a rabbit. And not about nothing. Try this triad on for size:

a) Tom Petty is a man.
b) Tom Petty is dead. (Tom Petty has died.)
c) Nothing dead is a man. (Nothing that has died is a man.)

Clearly, the singer is a man, not a duck or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy.  And clearly, Petty is dead. It seems to follow that Petty is a dead man.  So it seems we ought to reject (c) above.  Is (c) not more reasonably rejected than the other two limbs of the triad? I would say so.

Granted, Petty is not the man he used to be.  He no longer breathes, for example.  He has lost much of the typical functionality of a man. So there is rational pressure to deny (a).  There does not appear to be a clean solution to the (a)-(c) puzzle.  The propositions cannot all be true. But it is not obvious which of them to reject.

David tells us that a dead man has ceased to be. (I will assume that to be = to exist.)  But it is not at all clear that a dead man such as Tom Petty has ceased to exist.  On one way of looking at it, Petty exists just as robustly (or as anemically) as I do. We both tenselessly exist.  It is just that every moment of his existence is earlier than the present moment, whereas this is not the case for me.  Petty is wholly past whereas I exist at present, and presumably also in future.  But we both exist (tenselessly)!  This is a possible view, and distinguished thinkers have subscribed to it, Albert Einstein to mention one. So it is not obvious, pace David, that when a man or a dog or any living thing dies, it ceases to exist.  David may be assuming that only what exists (present tense), exists.  But this is a miserable tautology unless David can supply a non-presentist reading of the second occurrence of 'exists.'

Third, to speak of 'becoming nothing' on death is misleading.  Death is the end of all becoming.  One has finally begone, as it were. [?] It's not that the dead lack something to distinguish them. Rather, they are not there to be distinguished one from another.  But this is not to say that my parents were indistinguishable as objects.  Nor is it to say that my thoughts about my parents are now indistinguishable.  Surely I can say, My mother was short and my father was tall. 

BV: David can say these things, but these past-tensed truths are (i) logically contingent and (ii) true at present.  So they need truthmakers that exist at present.  What might these be if only what exists at present exists?  This, in nuce, is the grounding objection to presentism. I don't see that David has a good answer to it. If, however, existence is tenseless, then the truthmakers are easily supplied. 

DB quoting BV: Nor do we want to say that a person who dies goes from being actual to being merely possible. There is clearly a distinction between an actual past individual and a merely possible past individual.  Schopenhauer is an actual past individual; his only son Willy is a merely possible past individual

Once again I'm afraid I can't regard 'being actual' and 'being merely possible' as denoting properties of individuals. How these predications are to be understood is not an easy question.  Suffice it to say that there is clearly a problem with  'Schopenhauer's only son Willy' when the philosopher's only child was a daughter.

BV: I don't get the daughter bit.  But surely David is an actual individual, not a merely possible individual.  I have no idea why he balks at this.  He is actual, not merely possible, or necessary, or impossible.  What's more, he is contingent: although he actually exists, he is possibly such that he does not exist.  There is no necessity that he exist at any time at which he exists.  And note that if 'actual' is true of everything, it does not follow that 'actual' is not a meaningful term.

DB quoting BV: On the 'growing block' theory, dead Petty exists. (This is obviously not a present-tensed use of 'exists.') He does not exist at present, but he exists in the sense that he belongs to the actual world.  Once actual, always actual. Is this wholly clear? No, but it is tolerably clear and plausible. After all, we are making singular reference to Petty, a concrete actual individual, as we speak, and this is a good reason to hold that he exists, not at present of course, but simpliciter.

The 'growing block' theory sounds like a kind of four-dimensionalism deriving from the physicist's notion of spacetime as a four-dimensional manifold.  We trace the world-lines of the particles that were ever part of Petty and we find that they form a densely packed blob within a certain spacetime region.  We are tempted to identify the contents of this region with Petty himself.  If we think of the ensemble of worldlines of all material particles as the actual world itself, then yes, the Petty blob seems indeed to belong to the actual world.  But this is a mistake.  The worldline of a particle represents not so much the particle itself but rather its history.  Likewise the blob we take to be Petty represents his biography, in mind-numbing detail.  We are confusing a thing with the life it lived.  Of course Petty belonged to the world---I don't see quite what 'actual' adds here---it's just that he does not belong to it any more.  Perhaps Bill is emphasising that Petty was a real man, not, say, a character in a fiction like Spinal Tap.  There is more than a hint here that Bill is appealing to a theory of direct reference.  Petty has to exist in order that we may refer to him.

BV: There are several gnarly issues that need disentangling. I'll leave that for later. David tells us that Petty was actual but is not now actual.  That is true, but trivial.   It may be that what David is advocating is that we simply use tensed language and not make any trouble for ourselves by asking such as questions as: what makes it true that Petty was a musician?  It may be that he is a tautological presentist who maintains that whatever exists, exists, where 'exists' in both occurrences is present-tensed.  It may be that he is refusing to stray from ordinary English and credit such high-flying metaphysical questions as: Is the whole of reality restricted to the present moment or not?

Presentism and Truthmakers: A Reply to David Brightly

I first want to apologize to David Brightly for not paying more attention to his ongoing gentlemanly critique of my ideas at his weblog, tillyandlola: Comments on the Maverick.    Although our minds work in very different ways, this is scant excuse for my not having engaged his incisive and well-intentioned critique more fully.  I shall make amends in this Lenten season and beyond. On 28 April 2019, he posted the following:

Presentism and Truthmakers

 

Bill runs through the truthmaker objection to presentism:  truths about the past are truths now and hence need present truthmakers yet under presentism there don't seem to be any.  Let's consider a variant of Bill's example: 

S. Kennedy commanded PT109.  

That's true.  But what in the present grounds this truth? On the face of it, that's a rather weird question.  Why should we expect there to be something about the world now that grounds a truth about the past? But Bill has a point I think: we say that S is true, now.  Bill rightly dismisses Ed Feser's half-hearted attempt to reconcile presentism and truthmakerism.  So what should we say about this puzzle?

Consider this sentence:

T.  Kennedy commands PT109.

In 1943 T was true and we may suppose that in 1943 the world was in some way that made it true.  But now in 2019 that way has long since ceased to be and T is no longer true.  How then do we express the way of 1943 from the vantage point of 2019?  We can't just use T as that is false.  Instead, the rules of English, unchanging over the intervening period, tell us to use S, a modification in tense of T.  The past way, once expressed by T is now expressed by S.  S is not a brute truth.  It's a rule-governed transformation of a made truth.  

 

.............................

 

Brightly appreciates that it won't do to say that (S) is just true.  As a contingent truth, (S) needs something external to it to explain its being true.  It needs a truthmaker. David also appreciates that, while the past-tensed (S) is true at present, on presentism  nothing that exists at present  could serve as the truthmaker of (S). Brightly's theory seems to be that because the past-tensed (S) is a rule-governed transformation of the present-tensed (T), and because (T) was a "made truth," i.e, was a truth having a truthmaker, (S) has a truthmaker too, namely the truthmaker of  (T).

 

But note that (T) WAS made true in 1943 by something that existed then, but does not exist now. So it is difficult to see how the truthmaker of (T) that DID exist, but does not now exist, can serve as the truthmaker of S.  (S) is true at present, and such a truth, if it has a truthmaker, has an existent truthmaker, a truth maker that on presentism presently exists. Equivalently, although (T) WAS true in 1943, it is false now.  Being false now, it has no truthmaker now. So if the truthmaker of (S) now is the truthmaker (T) had then, then (S) has no truthmaker now.  

 

Brightly might simply be denying that past-tensed contingent truths such as (S) need truthmakers. But if present-tensed contingent truths need them -- and they obviously do -- then it it is difficult to see how the mere passage of time can absolve them of this need when these present-tensed truths become past-tensed truths by that "rule-governed transformation" that David spoke about.  For example, 'I am blogging' is now true, but in an hour it will be false. An hour from now 'I was blogging' will be true.  Now abstract from tense and indexicality. The result is BV blogs. The bolded expression picks out the tenseless propositional content that is common to the present-tensed 'BV is blogging' (or 'BV blogs')  and the past-tensed 'BV was blogging' (or 'BV blogged.')

 

It is the contingency of that propositional content, and its reference beyond itself, that requires that there be a truthmaker for said content.  The tense of the content is irrelevant to the requirement.  So if present-tensed truths need truthmakers, then so do past-tensed truths.  The mere passage of time cannot abrogate the requirement.

 

If so, then the truthmaker objection to presentism is up and running. For on presentism, the present alone exists. But if so, then there are no past-tensed contingent truths: there is nothing in reality to ground their truth. The upshot would appear to be a denial of the reality of the past.  

Life's Fugacity

As we age, the passage of time seems to accelerate.  This is a mere seeming since, if time passes at all, which itself may be a mere seeming, time presumably passes at a constant rate.  When we are young, the evanescence of our lives does not strike us.  But to us mid-streamers and late-streamers the fluxious fugacity of this life is all too apparent.

Why does time's tempo seem to speed up as the years roll on?  Part of the explanation must be that there is less change and more stasis from decade to decade.  Dramatic changes in body and mind and environment occur in the first two decades of life.  You go from being a helpless infant to a cocky youth.  Your horizon expands from the family circle to the wide world.  In the third decade, biological growth over with,  one typically finishes one's education and gets settled in a career.  But there are still plenty of changes.  From age 20 to 30, I lived in about 15 different places in California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Austria, and Germany, studied at half a dozen universities, and worked as a guitar player, logger, tree planter, furniture mover, factory worker, mailman, taxi driver, exterminator, grave digger, and philosophy professor.  But from 30 to 40, I lived in only five different places with exactly one job, and from 40 to 50 in three places,  and from ages 49 to the present I have had exactly one permanent address.  And it won't be long, subjectively speaking, before I have exactly one address that is permanent in the absolute as opposed to the relative sense.

Abstracta: Omnitemporal or Timeless?

Is everything in time? Or are there timeless entities? 

So-called abstracta are held by many to be timeless.  Among abstracta we find numbers, (abstract as opposed to concrete) states of affairs, mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) sets, and Fregean (as opposed to Russellian) propositions, where a Fregean proposition (Gedanke) is the sense (Sinn) of a  sentence (Satz) in the indicative mood  from which all indexical elements, including the tenses of verbs, have been removed.  The following items are neither in space, nor causally active/passive, but some say that they exist in time at every time: 7, 7's being prime, {7}, that 7 is prime.  If an item exists in time at every time, then it is omnitemporal.  If an item is 'outside' time, then it is timeless or eternal or, to be helpfully pleonastic in the manner of the late Hugh McCann, timelessly eternal.

Let us agree that a temporalist is one for whom everything is in time, while an eternalist is one for whom some things are not in time. This is a correct use of 'eternalist' as opposed to the misuse of those who use 'eternalism' to oppose presentism by maintaining that temporal items such as Socrates and his drinking of the hemlock exist tenselessly. Temporal items that exist tenselessly are precisely temporal items and not eternal items. It is perhaps for this reason that McCann's pleonasm is justified.  The tenselessly 'eternal' is in time and therefore not timelessly eternal. 

On p. 55 of his Creation and the Sovereignty of God (Indiana University Press 2012), Hugh McCann argues that the temporalist, who maintains that everything is in time, cannot formulate his thesis without presupposing that there are timeless states of affairs, at least of the negative sort.  Here is how I see the argument. 

Part of what the temporalist says is that

1. There are no timeless states of affairs.

How is 'there are no' in (1) to be understood?  The temporalist must intend it to be taken in a way consistent with temporalism, thus:

2. There never have been, are not now, and never will be any timeless states of affairs.

Unfortunately, the eternalist, who maintains that some things are not in time,  will agree with the temporalist on the truth of (2).  Consider 7's being prime.  Both agree that at no time does this state of affairs exist.  It does not exist at any time because it exists outside of time. The agreement is unfortunate because it shows that the bone of contention cannot be formulated in terms of (2).  The bone of contention must be formulated in terms of (1) taken tenselessly.  Thus

1.* It is tenselessly true that there are no timeless states of affairs.

But (1.*) entails

3. It is timelessly true that there are no timeless states of affairs.

But (3) is self-refuting. Temporalism, when properly formulated, i.e., when formulated in a way that permits disagreement between temporalist and eternalist, refutes itself by implying its own negation.

So not everything can be in time. Abstracta are timeless, not tenseless.

A Parallel with the Problem of Formulating Presentism

We have seen in previous posts that to avoid tautology the presentist, according to whom the temporally present alone exists, must reach for a tenseless sense of 'exists.'  He cannot say, tautologically, that whatever exists (present tense) exists now.  For that is not metaphysical 'news.'  It is nothing to fight over, and fight we must.  He has to say: Whatever tenselessly exists, exists now.  But then he seems to presuppose that there are times, as real as the present time, at which temporal individuals such as Socrates tenselessly exist.  The upshot is that when presentism is given a non-tautological formulation, a formulation that permits disagreement beween presentist and anti-presentist, it refutes itself.  For if there are non-present times as real as the present time, then it is not the case that only present items exist. 

The Augustinian Meta-Predicament

The Augustinian predicament is that, if you don't ask me what time is; I know. But if you ask me, I don't know.

The meta-predicament is that, if you don't press me too hard, I know what the main issues in dispute are, and what the main theories of time state; but if you press me and demand clear explanations, then I find that I don't know.

Not Enough Time! A Philosopher's Lament

There is not enough time to understand this life in time, but then it is such a fleeting, paltry thing, such a blend of form and formlessness, such a chiaroscuro of light and dark, such a scene of desires insistent yet insatiable, ultimately unknowable and ultimately unreal -- that the time allotted is perhaps time enough.