Presentism, persistence and trans-temporal dependence

Tallant, Jonathan

doi:10.1007/s11098-017-0955-9

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…as it is evident in the notion of thisness, that Ingram suggests, or in virtue of a property having existed, as Tallant suggests. 45 It is quite evident that although nefarious presentists claim that their view does not pick out any ontology, the insistence on this claim will end up being a self-defeating one. A tense operator applies to a thing, either concept or object, and the existence of it, even of the Menoingian kind can be inferred.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nefarious Presentism: A Recourse to Primitivism

Ajiboro

2020

Conatus

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Presentism is one of the various views in the discourse on the existence of time and spatio-temporal reality which holds that only the present is real and also that only present things exist. Neil McKinnon characterizes presentism in some ways that are all problematic, although he claims that the most appealing of all is the statement that “only present entities exist.” This view permeates all thoughts about presentism, and it has led to problems about the formulation of presentism. The link between accepting the existence of a temporal part (present) and the events that have that part as its spatio-temporal reference creates a hub of debate among presentists, and this raises a lot of issues not just in metaphysics, but in other areas of philosophical discourse as well. Tallant and Ingram take a challenging position on this issue as presentists in their own right. For them, the requisite status of a presentist properly so-called should be of a commitment to the reality of the present exclusively. In this paper, I engage the views of Tallant and Ingram on the problems of presentism such as triviality and truthmaking as regards ontological implications. I will argue that the avoidance of ontological commitment in nefarious presentism does appear to avoid the problem of truthmaking, which implies avoiding an analysis of truth in order to solve the problem of truthmaking. I will also argue that this avoidance to address the principle of un-analyzability of thisness is a recourse to primitivism.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nefarious Presentism: A Recourse to Primitivism

Ajiboro

2020

Conatus

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“…A similar reply can be o fered -I think -to a more sophisticated objection, made by Tallant (2018). 10 He claims that perdurantists and stage viewers are bound to accept transtemporal identity dependencies and that these dependencies are incompatible with the presentist ontology.…”

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confidence: 84%

“…The trouble for the presentist is that, since she takes no more than one stage at a time to be real, she can at best say that x depends for its identity upon its present parts. But given that which stages are present changes as time goes by, the identity of the sum itself will change as time goes by (Tallant 2018(Tallant : 2212.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Thus, these other stages depend for their identity on being counterpart theoretic related to [Alan]. This seems a clear case of identity dependence (Tallant 2018(Tallant : 2213. Italics in the original).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Once again, the presentist has a problem here, since Alan is the only stage that can be real. But then there is no past or future stage than can be counterpart theoretic related to Alan (Tallant 2018(Tallant : 2213. The absurd conclusion follows that Alan does not persist.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Fragmentalist Presentist Perdurantism

Iaquinto

2018

Philosophia

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Perdurantists think of continuants as mereological sums of stages (that is, sums of instantaneous spatiotemporal parts) from di ferent times. This view of persistence would force us to drop the idea that there is genuine change in the world. By exploiting a presentist metaphysics, Brogaard (2000) proposed a theory, called presentist four-dimensionalism, that aims to reconcile perdurantism with the idea that things undergo real change. However, her proposal commits us to reject the idea that stages must exist in their entirety. Giving up the tenet that all the stages are equally real could be a price that perdurantists are unwilling to pay. I argue that Kit Fine (2005)'s fragmentalism provides us with the tools to combine a presentist metaphysics with a perdurantist theory of persistence without giving up the idea that reality is constituted by more than purely present stages.

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The epistemic objection against perdurantism

Tullio,

Soriani

2024

Synthese

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According to Perdurantism, persons are identical to maximal aggregates of appropriately interrelated temporal parts. Within the Perdurantist framework, an epistemic concern arises, targeting the perduring persons’ belief that they are persons, suggesting that, ultimately, they are not in a position to know that they are persons as opposed to temporal parts. Despite the consideration it has received over the years, this concern has not yet been converted into a full-fledged objection. This paper aims to address this gap by exploring the possibility of formulating a coherent Epistemic Objection against Perdurantism. We shall examine several epistemological principles around which such an objection might be built, arguing that none of them, in the end, allows a plausible formulation of the objection. As a result, we shall conclude that the burden of proving that in a Perdurantist setting persons are not in a position to know that they are persons rests with the objectors.

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Presentism, persistence and trans-temporal dependence

Abstract: My central thesis is that presentism is incompatible with all of the main theories of persistence: endurance, exdurance (stage theory) and perdurance.

Cited by 9 publications

References 17 publications

Nefarious Presentism: A Recourse to Primitivism

Nefarious Presentism: A Recourse to Primitivism

Fragmentalist Presentist Perdurantism

The epistemic objection against perdurantism

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