Presentism and Eternalism

This paper contains an investigation of Leibniz’s ontology of time. Standard debates on Leibniz’s theory of time hinge upon the question whether the nature of time is relative or absolute and focus mainly on the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence. Focusing instead on Theodicy and referring to the contemporary frame and debate, I address some different questions: whether Leibniz is an A-theorist or a B-theorist, or an advocate of a hybrid form of an A/B-theory; and whether he is a presentist (who think that only present things and states of affairs exist) or an eternalist (who claims that past, present and future things and states of affairs are equally real). After careful analysis of several passages that seemingly support a presentist interpretation, I conclude that under the most charitable interpretation Leibniz should be considered as an eternalist, and precisely as a dynamical one. I further argue that Leibniz’s peculiar view on modality mirror this hybrid theory of time.

Presentism is, roughly, the metaphysical doctrine that maintains that whatever
exists, exists in the present. The compatibility of presentism with the theories of
special and general relativity was much debated in recent years. It has been argued
that at least some versions of presentism are consistent with time-orientable models
of general relativity. In this paper we confront the thesis of presentism with relativistic
physics, in the strong gravitational limit where black holes are formed. We
conclude that the presentist position is at odds with the existence of black holes and
other compact objects in the universe. A revision of the thesis is necessary, if it is
intended to be consistent with the current scientific view of the universe.

The physical sciences have always had a significant impact on philosophical thinking about time; I argue that the experiential aspects of time are also very relevant in this regard.  An examination of Zeno’s arrow paradox reveals the need to distinguish between the experiential and non-experiential aspects of motion.  Generalizing from this, I argue that we can usefully distinguish between the experiential and non-experiential (or purely metaphysical) aspects of temporal passage.  So doing has implications for the reality of temporal passage: those who adopt a sufficiently robust realism with regard to experience can acknowledge the full reality of one important aspect of passage.  However, for this option to be available to those who deny the existence of metaphysical passage—e.g. Block theorists (or eternalists)—the experiential and metaphysical modes of passage must be independent of one another.  I argue that there are good reasons for supposing that these are in fact independent.  I conclude with a review of as-yet unresolved problems regarding temporal experience, and suggest some topics which are likely to prove fruitful areas for future research.

The question whether God knows particular individuals has traditionally attracted the attention of Islamic scholars: Does the perishability of worldly individuals entail problems about the perishability of God's corresponding knowledge? Can one eternally know that Zayd will arrive tomorrow to the city? In this paper, I systemically and historically analyze (1) how post-Avicennian philosophers distinguished between two pre-Avicennian kalām views on whether such knowledge is eternal or perishable; (2) how they regarded Avicenna's famous theory that God knows particulars qua universals as connected to the pre-Avicennian kalām debate; (3) and how the authors such as Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) and Šihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191) attempted to synthesize Avicenna and kalām epis-temology in their account of God's knowledge as relation or as presence.

(from the Introduction)
Intending only to research medieval conceptions of hell, author Alan Bernstein wanted to investigate postmortem retribution in the ancient world for historical context. This investigation turned into an entire book of its own. In The Formation of Hell, Bernstein seeks to explain how the idea of hell achieved a prominent place in people’s minds. He explicitly states that he intends to accomplish this without any prior concern for whether hell actually exists or any preceding judgement as to the nature or value of hell.  In the end, Bernstein provides a superb example of historical investigation and rigorous scholarship. Though there are certain theological and metaphysical implications omitted from the book, the author successfully demonstrates that the notion of hell originally arose late in Judaism out of a need to explain the injustices in the world and became a rhetorical device designed to elicit conformity to religious and cultural mores.

Music is an art of time; being also a 'syntax' of time, it transforms our experience of time into a narrative. Yet, it is transmitted through scores, in which the time and sound of music are turned into space and signs. Thus, an accomplished reader will be able to gather, from a musical score, meaningful information about aural events unfolding in time through the instantaneous observation of a graphic notation. The musician's experience of the score will therefore be akin to the simultaneous presence of different moments in time, and thence it will allow an analogical intuition of the 'eternal present', i.e. the divine encompassing of Time in a single, eternal instant. La musica è un'arte del tempo. Essendo anche una 'scrittura del tempo', trasforma la nostra esperienza del tempo in una 'storia'. Tuttavia, la musica si trasmette tramite le partiture, nelle quali il tempo e i suoni della musica sono resi tramite spazio e segni. Perciò, i musicisti esperti sono in grado di ricavare da uno spartito delle informazioni significative su eventi uditivi che si svolgono nel tempo attraverso l'osservazione istantanea di una notazione grafica. L'esperienza che il musicista ha dello spartito sarà perciò simile alla presenza simultanea di diversi momenti del tempo; di conseguenza, essa permette di intuire analogicamente la dimensione dell'eterno presente, ossia la comprensione divina del Tempo in un unico, eterno istante.

The claim that we directly apprehend change and succession in our ordinary experience is phenomenologically plausible – after all, we certainly seem to, at least over short intervals. However, there are those who hold that any attempt to grant consciousness temporal breadth falls into incoherence. I argue here that this is wrong, and defend the "extensional" conception of temporal experience over its "retentional" rival. I then argue that this means that reality itself must be dynamic, simply because experience is dynamic, and experience is part of reality. The precise extent to which the dynamism we find in our experience impacts on the rest of the universe depends on the (much contested) relationship between consciousness and the rest of the universe; on some views it will be trivial, on others immense. Of the different metaphysical accounts of the nature of time currently on offer, Presentism is (arguably) the most dynamic. However, Presentism – at least in its standard guise – looks to be irreconcilable with the extensional account of temporal experience. The way forward, I suggest, is to adopt a modified form of Presentism. I conclude by examining the implications of this view of experience for the claim that we might very probably be short-lived "Boltzmann Brains".

This work aims to make tense logic a more robust tool for ontologists, philosophers, knowledge engineers and programmers by outlining a fusion of tense logic and ontology of time. In order to make tense logic better understandable, the central formal primitives of standard tense logic are derived as theorems from an informal and intuitive ontology of time. In order to make formulation of temporal propositions easier, temporal operators that were introduced by Georg Henrik von Wright are developed, and mapped to the ontology of time.

L'ontologia temporale è la riflessione sullo statuto ontologico delle entità meramente passate o future. In questo contributo intendo chiarire il significato di questa questione, presentare le principali opzioni teoriche che si delineano rispetto ad essa e, concentrandomi sulle due principali teorie contendenti, B-eternismo e presentismo, illustrare gli argomenti più rilevanti formulati a favore dell'una e dell'altra.

"Science will not trust us with another world."      Emily Dickinson

One of the great mysteries of physics today is what to make of the vast unaccounted for presence of what we call “Dark Matter”.
Physicists, being based in and on the world of the physical, are poring through calculations, but seem stuck at the conceptual level. Conceiving of some thing that might fit the bill of being present, and yet absent - or at least un-observable – is a real problem for the human mind.
I want to suggest a possibility.
It’s very simple, conceptually, but its “proof of pudding” may take an eternity – at the very least.

Dark matter might just be the “presence” of the future.

Paper forthcoming:  December, 2016.

This paper argues: first, that a presentist, powers based, diachronic account of modality can provide a satisfactory account of our intuitions about modality as well as a compelling rebuttal to alternative accounts; second that taking this account seriously requires a more radically attenuated modal logic than even partisans of such an account realize. Attempting to navigate this problem, I provide a formal, non-normal semantics for a tensed modal logic, along with a philosophical interpretation of it.

Considering the contemporary analytic metaphysics of time, in my paper I assume that Severino’s position amounts to a sophisticated form of dynamical eternalism akin to the so-called moving spotlight view. I argue that one of Severino’s core arguments against nihilism can be formulated – in the framework of analytic philosophy – as the objection that presentism is self-defeating. Presentism essentially claims that (1) reality is confined to the present and (2) that entities go into and out of existence over time. Thus, Severino’s objection can be formulated as follows: either the presentists, in order to maintain that some entities have gone out of existence, refer to them by singular propositions stating that these fully past entities do not exist anymore (or yet), or they fail to affirm genuine change. In the former case, such negative existential propositions necessarily turn out to be false (given that singular propositions are existence-entailing) and so does presentism itself; in the latter case, presentism fails to claim that reality genuinely changes, relapsing thus into eternalism. I consider – as possible defences of presentism – both the use of definite descriptions to talk about past entities without referring to them, and the alleged opacity of temporal operators (i.e. the negation of the temporal equivalent of the Barcan’s formula).

Presentism is the view that, with the possible exception of things outside of time, everything that exists, exists at the present time. It is contrasted with eternalism, the view that everything which ever did exist or ever will exist, exists. Some philosophers argue that presentism and eternalism are not really substantive, opposed metaphysical theses. I consider some attempts in the literature to rebut this skeptical position, and argue that they are unsatisfactory. Then I make my own case for the conclusion that presentism and eternalism are substantive metaphysical theses by drawing a distinction between two ways of talking about what exists with respect to a time, and imagining a hypothetical analogous debate about the nature of space.

The grounding objection to presentism rests on two premises: (i) every true proposition P has a truthmaker T, and (ii) some claims about the future and past are obviously true. However, if the future and past do not exist, there can be no truthmakers for future and past tensed expressions. Presentists tend not to challenge the premises of the objection. Instead they argue that the present contains all the truthmakers we need. Presentists should challenge the premises instead. First, finding truthmakers in the present only results in the postulation of implausible and/or ethereal entities that ultimately fail to solve the grounding objection. Second, no manifestly absurd consequences follow from accepting the lack of truth-values for tensed expressions. Third, the grounding objection does not just require the assumption that for every truth there is a truthmaker, but also that for every truthmaker there is a truth. I show how one can deny the latter without denying the former. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________

A perennial question in the philosophy of time concerns the relation between the objective “physical time” that features in empirical theories of motion and the subjective “human time” in which our own experiences unfold. This article is about one facet of this broader question: whether the phenomenon of conscious- ness allows us to make a principled distinction between the present and other times. A number of authors have argued that, without conscious observers, there would be no distinctions of past, present, and future. This paper defends the opposing thesis that there is no interesting connection between consciousness and presentness.

I will discuss three arguments in favor of perdurantism, the thesis that objects persist by having temporal parts located at different times. Firstly, I will introduce the rival accounts of persistence of perdurantism and endurantism. Then I will discuss three arguments for perdurantism: the problem of temporary intrinsics, the argument from vagueness and the argument from Special Relativity. I will conclude that none of them represents a knock-down argument for perdurantism. However, endurantism faces important difficulties in offering its solutions to the issues at stake, and the solutions proposed are often at odds with commonsense. Therefore, if one of the main problem for perdurantism is its being at odds with commonsense, endurantism is in no better position with respect to this issue.

While many find it plausible to think that the present generation has obligations to future generations, it is more controversial to think that future generations have rights against the present generation to, say, certain natural resources. In this paper I consider two arguments against attributing such rights to future persons: the 'non-existence' argument and the 'no-satisfaction' argument. I contend that there is an adequate response to both arguments that draws upon the resources of a particular view on the ontology of time: eternalism. According to eternalism, past and future objects and times are just as real as the present moment and present objects.

Dispositionalism grounds modality in the powers of existing things. Eternalism assumes 'exists' ranges equally over past, present, and future entities. In this article, I show that eternalism is incompatible with the most plausible understanding of what it is that dispositionalist modality explains: generation and corruption. As such, the dispositionalist is forced, against dispositionalism's traditional categorization as a form of actualism, to deny that everything exists.

Presentism is, roughly, the metaphysical doctrine that maintains that whatever exists, exists in the present. The compatibility of presentism with the theories of special and general relativity was much debated in recent years. It has been argued that at least some versions of presentism are consistent with time-orientable models of general relativity. In this paper we confront the thesis of presentism with relativistic physics, in the strong gravitational limit where black holes are formed. We conclude that the presentist position is at odds with the existence of black holes and other compact objects in the universe. A revision of the thesis is necessary, if it is intended to be consistent with the current scientific view of the universe.

Tenseless theorists assert that the relational structure of earlier/
later is the essential structure of time. Using B-notions, so they
think, we speak about time `as it is' in a metaphysical sense
and hence from the outside of our subjective perspective on
it. I suggest on the contrary that the relational structure of
earlier/later is part of our own intellectual structuring within
the access to temporal phenomena. Furthermore it is essentially
characterized by the structure of juxtaposition which originates
in spatial experience rather than in temporal. In order to show
this I consult Henri Bergson's analysis of our temporal experience
on the one hand and of our intellectual practice on the other
hand. I will conclude that it is not unplausible to take the
relational account of time to be more closely connected to the
nature of our intellect than to the nature of time itself.

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.

Take open-future Humeanism to comprise the following four tenets: (T1) that truth supervenes on a mosaic of local particular matters of fact (T2) that there are no necessary connections between distinct existences (T3) that there is a dynamic present moment, and (T4) that there are no future facts; that is, contingent propositions about the future obtain truth values only when their referents are actualised (Tooley 1997). Prima facie this is a deeply problematic metaphysic for the Humean, since given that the widely accepted Humean conception (that of David Lewis 1986a) takes all truths (inclusive of nomological truths) to supervene on an omnitemporal mosaic of local particular matters of fact, if there are no future facts then the Humean can neither provide laws of nature, nor justify many everyday inductive inferences (Hüttemann 2014). However, I argue that this eternalist metaphysic is in tension with at least one of Hume’s central metaphysical claims concerning causation e.g., that causal regularities may cease to hold at any time. In this paper I propose and defend one possible open-future Humean metaphysic which admits of ‘true-to-Hume’ causal and nomological facts. Furthermore, although I am happy to concede that induction is problematic for the open-future Humean, I demonstrate that it poses no greater threat to the open-future conception than it does to the popular Lewisian conception of natural law.

This paper considers the prospects for a theory of intergenerational rights in light of certain ontologies of time. It is argued that the attempt to attribute rights to future persons or obligations to present persons towards future persons, faces serious difficulties if the existence of the future is denied (a position I call 'No-Futurism'). The difficulty of attributing rights to non-existent future persons is diagnosed as a particularly intractable version of the 'problem of cross-temporal relations' that plagues No-Futurist views like presentism. I develop a version of the problem of cross-temporal relations regarding cross-temporal normative relations. I then consider and reject various solutions to the problem available to No-Futurists. The upshot of the discussion is that which ontology of time we choose sets constraints on the kinds of explanations we may offer for our future-directed obligations.

El problema de la dimensionalidad del universo consiste en determinar si el presente tiene algún privilegio ontológico sobre el pasado y el futuro. Hay dos tipos de respuestas: 1) el presentismo, según el cual sólo existe el presente; y 2) el eternalismo, según el cual los objetos de tiempos pasados y futuros son tan reales como los que existen ahora. Ésta última postura representa la realidad como un Universo Bloque en el cual todos los sucesos tienen una posición fija e inalterable. Si bien ambas posturas parecen tener sus méritos en el debate a priori, algunos filósofos sostienen que una teoría física, la Teoría Especial de la Relatividad, ofrece razones a posteriori para aceptar una ontología eternalista. El objetivo de esta ponencia es mostrar que esta última sugerencia no es adecuada: los argumentos eternalistas descansan en fenómenos que dependen de la sincronización de relojes, pero ésta contiene un elemento convencional que puede modificarse manteniendo todas las evidencias empíricas que dan apoyo a la Relatividad Especial. Hay, sin embargo, autores como Petkov y Weinggard que sostienen que tal convencionalidad en el establecimiento de la sincronía es posible, justamente, porque el universo es el bloque del que habla el eternalismo. Por tal motivo, analizaré esta tesis mostrando que descansa en una interpretación errónea acerca del papel de la sincronía y el tiempo en la relatividad.

This paper considers the prospects for a theory of intergenerational rights in light of certain ontologies of time. It is argued that the attempt to attribute rights to future persons or obligations to present persons towards future persons, faces serious difficulties if the existence of the future is denied (a position I call ‘No-Futurism’). The difficulty of attributing rights to non-existent future persons is diagnosed as a particularly intractable version of the ‘problem of cross-temporal relations’ that plagues No-Futurist views like presentism. I develop a version of the problem of cross-temporal relations regarding cross-temporal normative relations. I then consider and reject various solutions to the problem available to No-Futurists. The upshot of the discussion is that which ontology of time we choose sets constraints on the kinds of explanations we may offer for our future-directed obligations.

A brief impression of the Workshop “Landscapes of the Long 18th Century: Mediating Places, Powers and Pasts in South Asia and Beyond,” which was organized by Dipti Khera and Hannah Baader on June 22-23, 2017 at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. This article provides a few insights into the amorphousness, both in spatial and temporal terms, of contemporary landscape thinking. Amorphousness, however, does not so much herald the end of conversations, as much as it serves as a clarion call to seek out more exacting and more rigorous ways of imagining unitary frameworks.

Consider a duty of beneficence towards a particular individual, S, and call a reason that is grounded in that duty a “beneficence reason towards S.” Call a person who will be brought into existence by an act of procreation the “resultant person.” Is there ever a beneficence reason towards the resultant person for an agent to procreate? In this paper, I argue for such a reason by appealing to two main premises. First, we owe a pro tanto duty of beneficence to future persons; and second, some of us can benefit some of those persons by procreating. In support of the first premise I reject the presentist account of time in favor of the view that future persons are just as real as presently existing persons. I then argue that future persons are like us in all the morally relevant ways, and since we owe duties of beneficence to each other, we also owe duties of beneficence to future persons. In support of the second premise I offer an account of benefiting according to which an individual can be benefited by an action even if it makes her no better off than she would have been, had the action not been performed. This account of benefiting solves what I call the “non-identity benefit problem.” Finally, I argue that having a life worth living is a benefit, and some of us can cause some persons that benefit by causing them to exist.