Abstract
For the most part, contemporary philosophy of time is governed by the distinction between Presentism and Eternalism. In understanding the nature of time, the choice seems to be between a moving present and a frozen history, laid out along the time-line. According to Presentism, the only concrete time that exists is the present. Everything that was past no longer exists and that which is in the future is yet to happen. The present moment keeps “flowing,” so that every instant is followed by a new instant in which part of the future becomes the present and the present becomes past. One frequently distinguishes between the past, present and future based on the types of action that are available. It is not possible to influence the past; actions take place only in the present. The future is pregnant with possibilities that might or might not be realized, depending on what we do in the present. Thus, Presentism is presupposed whenever one forms plans for the future or allows for the possibility that things could have been otherwise than they are.
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Notes
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I am here ignoring the distinction between perdurantists and endurantists, which may cause consternation for some metaphysicians of time. Perdurantists believe that objects are four-dimensional, and that the time-slices of an object form genuine parts of the object. Endurantists believe that objects are three-dimensional, and that these objects endure throughout time, with different properties instantiated in the object at different times. While eternalists are ordinarily perdurantists, it is certainly consistent for an eternalist to be an endurantist about objects, although this is not an easy position to hold. I will not go into this debate about the nature of objects, except to say that both perdurantists and endurantists take time-slices as the basic entities from which objects are comprised. Either one believes that an object is wholly present when a single time-slice is present (which makes the view endurantist), or one believes that the object is wholly present in virtue of all time-slices being present (which makes the view perdurantist). I am trying to undercut the distinction between endurantism and perdurantism as well, since I am suggesting that being present at t is not the same as existing.
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This image of the present moving from one instant to the “next” may be seriously misleading, since the assumption is that the temporal dimension can be modeled by a real line. Since the instants along this line are dense, between any two temporal instants there is another. Thus, strictly speaking there is no single instant that can be designated as the “next” one, just as there is no single spatial point that is the next point to the right of the point marked 0. But one may speak loosely in this way to describe the movement of the now.
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See Diekemper (2005) for an argument that a pure presentist position is inconsistent with the asymmetric fixity of the temporal order.
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See Hinchliff (1996) for an attempt to resist the transitivity of the coexistence relation.
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See Clifton and Hogarth (1995, pp. 382–83).
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See Callender (2000) for an argument claiming that this definition of Presentism steers too far from our standard presentist intuition.
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Sider, for example, argues that limiting existing events to a single spacetime point is extremely counterintuitive:
… the presentist might banish all of space-time other than a single point. (A related proposal would be to banish all of spacetime other than a single point plus its past light cone.) Note that the right way to assert here-now-ism is to say that only a single point of the spacetime is real, that there exist no spatiotemporally distant events. The wrong way is to say that at any point in the spacetime, only a single point of spacetime is real. This suggests a misleading picture, that there are multiple points in spacetime, but somehow, from the perspective of one of them, the others are not real. Unless the presentist is involved in a Meinongian distinction between being and existence, this can only be a confusion. (Sider, 2001, p. 44)
Sider’s argument is based on the assumption that the relation of coexistence must be either true or false. If spatiotemporally distant events do not coexist with the here-now, then they do not exist when the here-now exists. On the other hand, if one looks at spacetime from the perspective of the spatiotemporally distant event, then the distant event exists and the here-now does not. Is it reasonable to assume that existence depends on the perspective of the spatiotemporal point? Isn’t existence simply a brute fact independent of the particular perspective? Sider’s worry may be resisted by insisting that relations of coexistence are not well defined on space-like separated events. One way to avoid defining relations of coexistence is to restrict the predicate “being present” to a particular point on a particular worldline. According to this proposal, it is meaningless to ask whether space-like separated events on different worldlines coexist. While this solution feels a little strained, there is no way to reject it out of hand.
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See Savitt (2000) for a critique of cone-Presentism.
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See Hawley (2006) for a discussion on the various strategies of defending metaphysical claims from conflicts with scientific theories.
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Frisch (2009) argues that causality principles govern the derivation of dispersion relations for the electromagnetic field. This application of a causal principle seems to provide evidence that in the context of relativistic field theories, principles of causation are scientifically relevant. As Frisch points out, the relevance of causal principles in this limited context does not imply an a priori commitment to causal principles for all scientific theories, which is Norton’s main source of objection to fundamentalism about causation.
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Belkind, O. (2012). The Metaphysics of Time. In: Physical Systems. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 264. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2373-3_4
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