Abstract
In this chapter we offer novel characterisations of presentism and permanentism which, or so we argue, significantly improve upon extant accounts. In particular, we show that, given the availability of these characterisations, neither presentism nor dynamic permanentism needs to invoke any substantial notion of presentness. In Sect. 5.1 we rehearse T. Williamson’s misgivings about the use of the notion of presentness in attempts to articulate presentism. While Williamson takes these misgivings to be sufficient to discard presentism, in Sect. 5.2 we show that the view allows for its systematic reformulation solely in terms of tensed quantification, temporal operators and a predicate for times. In Sect. 5.3, after giving a characterisation of static permanentism and critically discussing R. Cameron’s recent account of the Moving Spotlight Theory, we offer an equally lean formulation of dynamic permanentism solely in terms of temporal operators and a tensed proposition true at one time only.
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- 1.
One source of confusion might be the mistaken thought that insofar as quantification is tensed, as we have assumed it is, ‘E!m’ proves equivalent to ‘m timelessly exists & m is present’ (see, for instance, Meyer 2013b) . This would be to misunderstand the significance of the present tense. For instance, when one says ‘The crisis is over’, one does not thereby affirm that the crisis is timelessly over and also present; and there is no reason to think that the tensedness of ‘E!m’ differs so radically from the tensedness of predication.
- 2.
Cf. Putnam (1962) on the abuse of the analytic-synthetic distinction.
- 3.
Presentism as characterised allows for temporally extended things with continuous existences , e.g. football matches, and can validate what we ordinarily say about them, making use of metric tense-operators . ‘The match will last for 90 minutes’ can be paraphrased as ‘90 minutes hence, (the match takes place & ∀n(n ≤ 90 ↔ n minutes ago, the match takes place))’. Note that here we quantify over numbers and not times.
- 4.
Lunar colonies are not substances according to the traditional conception of what substances are, which suggests that what Cameron has in mind here really are concrete particulars. He also mentions the Scottish parliament in his discussion of entities in time that are in the scope of his version of the Moving Spotlight Theory (Cameron 2015: 209). Calling institutions ‘substances’ is equally non-standard, which confirms our suspicion. We will nonetheless follow Cameron’s official terminology in presenting his view.
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Correia, F., Rosenkranz, S. (2018). The Other Contenders. In: Nothing To Come. Synthese Library, vol 395. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78704-6_5
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