The Virtues of Thisness Presentism

Abstract

Presentists believe that only present things exist. But opponents insist this view has unacceptable implications: if only present things exist, we can't express singular propositions about the past, since the obvious propositional constituents don't exist, nor can we account for temporal passage, or the openness of the future. According to such opponents, and in spite of the apparent 'common sense' status of the view, presentism should be rejected on the basis of these unacceptable implications. In this paper, I present and defend a version of presentism ('Thisness Presentism') that avoids the unacceptable implications. The basic strategy I employ is familiar-I postulate presently existing entities to serve as surrogates (or 'proxies') for non-present entities-but some of the details of my proposal are more novel, and their application to these problems is certainly novel. One overarching thesis of this paper is that Thisness Presentism is preferable to other versions of presentism since it solves important problems facing standard iterations of the view. And I assume that this is a good positive reason in favour of the underlying thisness ontology.

Flow Fragmentalism

“…Rather, past‐tensed and future‐tensed truths would supervene on how the world is now, namely on past and future facts in the weak sense. Alternatively, a presentist may adopt a haecceitist version of OP, which treats past and future entities as uninstantiated “thisnesses” (Adams, ; Keller, ; Ingram, , )…”

Presentism, persistence and trans-temporal dependence

“…If there is no constituent, we have no referring singular proposition that picks out Caesar; or so goes the standard view [cf. the presentation given in Ingram (2016aIngram ( , b: 2874Ingram ( -2882]. Now the answer that most presentists give to this question ('what entity can constitute a past-tensed proposition that refers to a non-existent, merely past entity?')…”

Temporal ersatzism

“…It is also worth noting that while it appears that versions of temporal ersatzism will always give rise to analogous versions of temporal proxyism, it is not at all clear that the converse is true. Consider, for instance, haecceitist versions of temporal proxyism, which say that the haecceities of past entities presently exist, and serve as proxies for those past entities (Adams, ; Ingram, ). A haecceity of some object, and the object itself are two distinct things.…”