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Dynamic events and presentism

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Abstract

Dynamic events such as a rolling ball moving from one place to another involve change and time intervals and thus presumably successions of static events occurring one after the other, e.g., the ball’s being at a certain place and then at another place during the interval in question. When dynamic events are experienced they should count as present and thus as existent from a presentist point of view. But this seems to imply the existence of the static events involved in them. This in turn seems to imply that there exist past and perhaps even future static events. Therefore, there is a problem for presentism. A possible way out for the presentist is proposed, based on allowing for time-indexed past-oriented and future-oriented properties. One may raise objections regarding the ontological status of these properties and the commitment to past and future objects and times that they seem to bring with them, but these objections can be put to rest.

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Notes

  1. As Casati and Varzi (2010) note, for some authors static events are not properly speaking events, because all events involve change (by definition). In line with this, one could follow Mourelatos (1978), Bach (1986) and Parsons (1990) and use a generic term such as “occurrence,” “eventuality” or “happening” to cover both the rabbit’s run and the vase’s being on the table, reserve “event” for the eventualities that involve change and adopt a term such as “state” for those that do not involve change.

  2. Note that in this way of talking events are repeatable exemplifications of properties or relations by objects. They can in principle occur at different times, to the extent that the relevant objects endure. Thus, for example, (1b) can occur again at a time later than t 2. If the time is “included” into an event, e.g., as in the event *x is in p 2 at time t 2*, the event should be regarded as unrepeatable. For present purposes it is appropriate to focus on events understood as repeatable entities.

  3. And of course more details are also needed to make room for the view that the future is open and that not all truths are determinate, possibly including a rejection in some sense of bivalence (see, e.g., Bourne 2006 on these issues).

  4. In the terminology of Craig (2000), the view that is being proposed here is thus a version of “instantaneous presentism,” a doctrine that Craig (2000) rejects for reasons independent from the main topic of this paper. We leave for another occasion a critical examination of these reasons.

  5. Similarly, in appealing to time-indexed properties to account for the truthmaking problem, Keller (2004) must appeal to entities (e.g., eternal, indestructible atomic particles) which, though past in that they already existed, say, when there were dinosaurs, are also present in that are still existing now. There is obviously no contradiction in being both past and present in this sense.

  6. We might perhaps say that what is here proposed is a version of presentism according to which all the temporal items that exist (such as ordinary objects and the events involving them) exist at the present time. This leaves room for timeless entities: abstract entities and the times themselves. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this.

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank especially Nathan Oaklander for precious suggestions on a previous version of this paper and for his encouragement. Useful comments were also offered by Mauro Dorato and an anonymous referee. Some of the ideas in this paper were presented in a talk at the conference Continuity and Discreteness between Science and Metaphysics, University of Urbino, Italy, November 19–21, 2009, funded by a 2007 PRIN grant from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) for the project Metaphysics and the A priori/A Posteriori Distinction. At that conference I benefitted from criticisms by the discussant Andrea Iacona and members of the audience.

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Orilia, F. Dynamic events and presentism. Philos Stud 160, 407–414 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9726-1

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