Giuliano Torrengo

Every criminal act ought to be matched by a corresponding punishment, or so we may suppose, and every punishment ought to reflect a criminal act. We know how to count punishments. But how do we count crimes? In particular, how does our notion of a criminal action depend on whether the prohibited action is an activity, an accomplishment, an achievement, or a state?

ABSTRACT Imagine a presentist who spells out her main tenets (see chapter 1.1 of the present volume), and an eternalist who immediately asks: 'So, how do you explain that I bear the relation of being a descendant to my late great grandfather?" Relations of this sort we shall label "cross-temporal relations" (CTR, from now on), while by "CTR-claims" we shall denote those claims that express one or more of such relations. CTR raise challenging problems for presentism. In the following we shall review the two main strategies that the presentist can endorse to withstand such a problem. The presentist may either endorse an "eliminativist" stance and claim that there are no CTR after all; or she can endorse a "reductionist" stance and argue that we can accommodate CTR within a presentist framework. We shall argue that both stances (in their many varieties) fail to work. The paper has three main sections: section 1 in which we set forth the problem, section 2 in which we criticize the eliminativist strategies, and section 3 in which we criticize the reductionist strategies.

When we cook, by meticulously following a recipe, or adding a personal twist to it, we sometimes care not only to (re-)produce a taste that we can enjoy, but also to give our food a certain aftertaste. This is not surprising, given that we ordinarily take aftertaste to be an important part of the gustatory experience as a whole, one which we seek out, and through which we evaluate what we eat and drink-at least in many cases. What is surprising is that aftertastes, from a psychological point of view, seem to be analogous to afterimages, and thus have little or no epistemic import. In this paper we tackle this puzzle, and argue that we are right in treating aftertastes seriously. The moral is that both from a metaphysical and an epistemic point of view aftertastes should be categorized differently from afterimages.

Discrimination is a social phenomenon which seems to be widespread across different societies and cultures. Examples of discrimination concerning race, class, gender, and sexual orientation are not difficult to find in western contemporary societies. In this paper, I focus on the ontological ground of such phenomenon, with particular attention to its diffuse and institutionalised forms. I defend a broadly speaking reductionist approach , according to which the various manifestations of discrimination are grounded on the existence of the effects of "discriminatory stances" in social contexts. Discrimination may become part of the institutional sphere, either by way of bottom-up "crystallisation" of discriminatory practices, or by top-down "dilution" of institutional defaults into ordinary interactions.

The analysis of the derogatory aspect of slurs has recently aroused interest among philosophers of language. A puzzling element of it is its erratic behaviour in embeddings, for instance negation or belief reports. The derogatory aspect seems sometimes to "scope out" from the embedding to the context of utterance, while at other times it seems to interact with the linguistic constructions in which the slur is implanted. I argue that slurs force us to maintain a kind of semantic indeterminacy which, to my knowledge , has passed largely unnoticed in philosophy of language.

The goal of this paper is to defend the general tenet that time travelers cannot change the past within B-theoretical models of time, independently of how many temporal dimensions there are. Baron (2017) offered a strong argument intended to reach this general conclusion. However, his argument does not cover a peculiar case, i.e. a B-theoretical one-dimensional model of time that allows for the presence of internal times. Loss (2015) used the latter model to argue that time travelers can change the past within such model. We show a way to debunk Loss's argument, so that the the general tenet about the impossibility of changing the past within B-theoretical models is maintained.

In this paper, I present a problem for the realist with respect to the institutional sphere, and suggest a solution. Roughly, the problem lies in a contradiction that arises as soon as institutional contexts are allowed to influence the institutional profile of objects and events not only in the present, but also in the past. If such "retroactive enactments" are effective, in order to avoid contradiction the realist seems to have to accept the unpleasant conclusion that institutions can create a past that has never been present. I will defend a solution which involves a distinction between temporal and atemporal types of institutional kinds that has, I maintain, independent interest.

As far as our experience goes, we live in a dynamic present. Those two phenomenal features of experience – presentness and dynamism – are obviously connected. However, how they are connected is not obvious at all. In this paper, I criticise the view according to which the former can explain the latter, which I call sophisticated representationalism. My criticism will be based on an ambiguity in the notion of tense found in the philosophical literature, that between the perspectival understanding and the dynamic understanding of tenses. The distinction is not just of independent interest, but it has a role in providing indirect evidence for the claim that the feeling of passage of time should be understood in non-representationalist terms. Keywords. Tense, Experience of the passage of time, A-and B-theory

Presentism, the view that only what's present exists, seems to be intuitively very appealing. The intuitive appeal of presentism constitutes a main reason for treating the view as a serious option and worthy of consideration. In this paper, I argue that the appearance of presentism's intuitiveness is based upon a series of misconceptions.

(Penultimate version. Forthcoming in Synthese)
I criticize Lockwood's solution to the " paradoxes " of time travel, thus endorsing Lewis's more conservative position. Lockwood argues that only in the context of a 5D space-time-actuality manifold is the possibility of time travel compatible with the Autonomy Principle (according to which global constraints cannot override what is physically possible locally). I argue that shifting from 4D space-time to 5D space-time-actuality does not change the situation with respect to the Autonomy Principle, since the shift does not allow us to have a coincidence-free local dynamical theory.

Even hard-core metaphysicians should admit that certain disputes may indeed turn out not to be substantive. The debate between presentism and eternalism has recently come under sceptical attack. The aim of the paper is to argue that a certain approach to presentism is indeed in danger of succumbing to the sceptic, and thus a no-go for the presentist.

The hyper-Russellian skeptic is someone who thinks that only one of all your experiences was, is, and will ever be conscious. Which one? The very one you are having now. Before you were always a zombie, and you will be a zombie for ever after. In the present literature on the metaphysics of passage of time, there is disagreement on whether our feeling that time passes — the " dynamic flavor " of our ordinary experience — provides support to the A-theory, that is, the thesis that the passage of time is an objective feature of reality. Lately, several philosophers have argued against this idea. In this paper I want to push this line of reasoning further by exploiting the hyper-Russellian scenario against the A-theory of time.

Many philosophers regard collective behaviour and attitudes as the ground of the whole of social reality. According to this popular view, society is composed basically of collective intentions and cooperative behaviours; this is so both for informal contexts involving small groups and for complex institutional structures. In this paper I challenge this view, and propose an alternative approach, which I term institutional externalism. I argue that institutions are characterised by the tendency to defer to elements that are external to the content of collective intentions—such as laws, declarations, and contracts. According to institutional externalism, those elements are the grounds of institutional statutes, rights and duties.

There seems to be a "what it is like" to the experience of the flow of time in any conscious activity of ours. In this paper, I argue that the feeling that time passes should be understood as a phenomenal modifier of our mental life, in roughly the same way as the blurred or vivid nature of a visual experience can be seen as an element of the experience that modifies the way it feels, without representing the world as being in a certain way. I defend my positions against the deflationary view according to which the passing of time does not have a specific phenomenal character, and the representationalist view according to which the feeling of time passing is a feature of the representational content of our experience, like being red or yellow.

In this paper I present a problem for the conventionalist regarding temporal metrics, and I defend an objectivist position on the ground of its explanatory force. Roughly, the conventionalist has it that there is no fact of the matter with respect to the truth or falsity of judgments of the kind “event e1 lasted as long as event e2”, while the objectivist thinks that they are grounded in objective features of space-time. I argue that, by positing grounds for judgments of relative temporal length, the objectivist gains an explanatory force that the conventionalist position lacks.

Ostrich presentists maintain that we can use all the expressive resources of the tensed language to provide an explanation of why true claims about the past are true, without thereby paying any price in terms of ontology or basic ideology. I clarify the position by making a distinction between three kinds of explanation, which has general interest and applicability. I then criticize the ostrich position because it requires an unconstrained version of the third form of explanation, which is out of place in metaphysics.

Opponents of presentism have often argued that the presentist has difficulty in accounting for what makes (presently) true past-tensed propositions (TptP) true in a way that is compatible with her metaphysical view of time and reality. The problem is quite general and concerns not only strong truth-maker principles, but also the requirement that truth be grounded in reality. In order to meet the challenge, presentists have proposed many peculiar present aspects of the world as grounds for truths concerning the past, such as uninstantiated haecceities, Meinongian non-existents, ersatz times, and dispositional and distributional properties. The main problem with all such solutions is that any explanation of what grounds a TptP that involves the past is eo ipso a better explanation than any that involves only the present. Thus, the quest for an account of grounding for TptP that is compatible with the presentist ontology and ideology is doomed to be explanatorily deficient with respect to eternalism. In a recent article, Ben Caplan and David Sanson have claimed that presentists should change their strategy and, rather than seeking for exotic grounds for TptP, should adopt a more liberal view of explanation. That is, they should allow themselves to resort to “past directed” explanations, even if they do not accept the past in their ontology and ideology. I argue that such a proposal is not compatible with the tenet that there is a substantial distinction between the ideology of such a version of presentism and that of eternalism. Therefore, the presentist cannot endorse such “deflationist” explanations as an easy way out to the problem of the grounding of TptP.

Sceptics about substantial disputes in ontology often argue that when two philosophers seem to disagree on a quantified claim, they are actually equivocating on the notion of existence that they are using. When temporal elements play a central role, as in the debate between presentists and eternalists, the hypothesis of an equivocation with respect to existence acquires more plausibility. However, the anti-sceptic can still argue that this hypothesis is unjustified.

I argue that, contrary to an idea to be found in popularizations of time travel, one cannot more easily multiply oneself by taking younger ver- sions of oneself back in time than by travelling back in time on one’s own. The reason is that the suggested multiplication of the traveller is, from a global perspective, only apparent.

Imagine a presentist who spells out her main tenets, and an eternalist who immediately asks: “So, how do you explain that I bear the relation of being a descendant to my late great grandfa- ther?” Relations of this sort we shall label “cross-temporal relations” (CTR, from now on), while by “CTR-claims” we shall denote those claims that express one or more of such relations. CTR raise challenging problems for presentism. In the following we shall review the two main strategies that the presentist can endorse to withstand such a problem. The presentist may either endorse an “eliminativist” stance and claim that there are no CTR after all; or she can endorse a “reductionist” stance and argue that we can accommodate CTR within a presentist framework. We shall argue that both stances (in their many varieties) fail to work. The paper has three main sections: section 1 in which we set forth the problem, section 2 in which we criticize the eliminativist strategies, and section 3 in which we criticize the reductionist strategies.

In this paper, we propose a revised version of Black’s original argument against the principle of identity of indiscernibles. Our aim is to examine a puzzle regarding the intuitiveness of arguments, by showing that the revised version is clearly less intuitive than Black’s original one, and appears to be unjustified by our ordinary means of assessment of intuitions.

Space and time are two obvious candidates as dimensions of reality. Yet, are they the only two dimensions of reality? Famously, David Lewis maintained the doctrine of modal realism‖, the thesis that possible worlds exist and are entities as concrete as the actual world that we live in. In this paper, I will explore the idea that modality can be construed as a dimension along with space and time. However, although Lewis‘ modal realism is the main source of inspiration for this construal of modality, I will argue that something else is required for having a modal dimension.

I present a new problem for the tense realist concerning the evaluation of cross-temporal claims, such as ‘John is now taller than Michael was in 1984’. Time can play two different roles in the evaluation of an utterance of a sentence: either as an element that completes the content expressed by the utterance (the completion role), or as part of the circumstances against which the content is evaluated (the evaluation role). It is this latter role that time plays in the realist view of tenses. I argue that if the content of a cross-temporal sentence is taken at face value (as an ascription of a crosstemporally instantiated relation), time does not play the evaluation role. Therefore, the world of the tense realist seems to leave no room for cross-temporality.

In a recent article in Dialectica, Dean Zimmerman has argued that the eternalist A-theorist (a.k.a. “moving spotlight” theorist) can distinguish her position  from that of the B-theorist serious tenser, only by appealing to a «non-relativized kind of truth that applies to propositions that are only temporarily true» (Zimmerman, 2005, p. 453), namely a notion of truth simpliciter as applied to tensed propositions. In what follows I will argue that this notion is spurious, and cannot do the job. My critique’s outline will remind Bergmann’s critiques against “monsters”, namely notions which, appearances notwithstanding, are irremediably blurred. The difference between the B-theorist serious tenser, and the eternalist A-theorist has rather to be drawn as a difference on whether tensed sentences require tensed truth-makers or not. My starting point will be a short détour through the debate over temporary intrinsics and presentism.

Every criminal act ought to be matched by a corresponding punishment, or so we may suppose, and every punishment ought to reflect a criminal act. We know how to count punishments. But how do we count crimes? In particular, how does our notion of a criminal action depend on whether the prohibited action is an activity, an accomplishment, an achievement, or a state?