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On Presentism, Endurance, and Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

H. Scott Hestevold  and
William R. Carter
H. Scott Hestevold
Affiliation:
Tuscaloosa, AL35487-0218USA
William R. Carter
Affiliation:
North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC27695-8103USA
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Extract

There has been much recent debate about Presentism among those who believe the doctrine to be nontrivial and true, those who believe it to be nontrivial and false, and those who believe it to be trivial — either trivially true or trivially false. Formulating Presentism precisely is problematic, which accounts for some of the controversy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , December 2002 , pp. 491 - 510
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2002

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References

1 ‘On the Incompatibility of Enduring and Perduring Entities,’ Mind 104 (1995), 523

2 ‘Temporary Intrinsics and Presentism,’ in Metaphysics: The Big Questions, P. van Inwagen and D.W. Zimmerman, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell 1998), 209

3 Time, Tense, and Causation (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997), 232

4 ‘Temporal Parts Unmotivated,’ The Philosophical Review 107 (1998), 236

5 ‘Presentism and Ontological Commitment,’ The Journal of Philosophy 96 (1999), 325. See also Sider's Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001): ‘According to presentism … only currently existing objects are real’ (11).

6 We agree with those who argue that the temporal dispute between presentists and eternalists is genuine on grounds that (i) the modal dispute between actualists and possibilists is not merely verbal and (ii) the temporal dispute is ‘merely verbal’ if and only if the modal dispute is merely verbal. See Sider, ‘Presentism and Ontological Commitment,’ 327.

7 T. Merricks, ‘Endurance and Indiscernibility,’ The Journal of Philosophy 91 (1994) 165-84. More recently, Merricks has offered accounts of Endurance and Perdurance cast in terms of parts simpliciter; see ‘Persistence, Parts, and Presentism,’ Nous 33 (1999) 421-38.

8 See, for example, Rea's argument involving special relativity in ‘Temporal Parts Unmotivated,’ 236.

9 Although Sider does not endorse Presentism, he defends it against a number of standard objections. Sider's thesis is that ‘presentism remains plausible if, or to the extent that, ordinary statements about the past can be shown to be quasi true.’ See ‘Presentism and Ontological Commitment,’ 339. We do not address in this paper quasi truth and its role in defending Presentism.

10 R.M. Chisholm's work on ‘Times and the Temporal’ reflects his view that the ‘assumption that there are times … multiplies entities beyond necessity’; see A Realistic Theory of Categories: An Essay on Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), 56-64. Chisholm and Zimmerman describe as mistaken the view that ‘times are a kind of contingent thing, distinct from the events which are said to happen in time’; see ‘Theology and Tense,’ Nous 31 (1997), 264.

11 We thank Hud Hudson for a helpful comment that led to our present formulations of Transient Time and Static Time.

12 Real Time II (London and New York: Routledge 1998), 20

13 ‘Theology and Tense,’ 265, 262. Cf. Q. Smith, Language and Time (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993), 165: ‘… ‘‘x exists’’ in the tenseless sense means ‘‘x existed, exists, or will exist,’’ where the middle ‘‘exists’’ is present tensed.’ See also J. Cargile, ‘Tense and Existence,’ in Cause, Mind, and Reality: Essays Honoring C.B. Martin, ed. by J. Heil, Philosophical Studies Series 47 (Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1989), 164.

14 Sider notes that this sort of analysis is not truth-preserving with respect to claims such as, ‘There tenselessly exists a set containing a dinosaur and a computer.’ See ‘Presentism and Ontological Commitment,’ 326-7.

15 Cf. Mellor, Real Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981), 40-2.

16 L.B. Lombard, ‘On the Alleged Incompatibility of Presentism and Temporal Parts,’ Philosophia 27 (1999), 254. See also Zimmerman, ‘Temporary Intrinsics and Presentism,’ 208-9.

17 ‘Time, Reality, and Relativity,’ in Demonstratives, P. Yourgrau, ed., Oxford Readings in Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990), 247

18 On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1986), 3. Cf. Sider, Four-Dimensionalism: ‘There is a single notion of existence relative to which there can be meaningful dispute…. [We] can meaningfully ask: do dinosaurs exist simpliciter? The eternalist says they do, while the presentist disagrees’ (17).

19 In ‘Persistence, Parts, and Presentism,’ Merricks formulates Endurance and Perdurance in terms of parts simpliciter. In Lewis's terms, one could say that an entity has a part simpliciter if it has a part that exists simpliciter.

20 ‘On Passage and Persistence,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 31 (1994), 270, 276. Cf. Sider, Four-Dimensionalism, 11-12.

21 ‘On the Alleged Incompatibility of Presentism and Temporal Parts,’ 254

22 Cf. J.A. Cover, ‘Reference, Modality, and Relational Time,’ Philosophical Studies 70 (1993), 264. Cover suggests that a time is a ‘whole, composed of events standing in the simultaneity relation.’ If Presentism is correct, then there exist no events other than present events; so, on Cover's view of what a time is, there could exist no time other than the present time.

23 Whether Transient Time implies Presentism is controversial. M. Tooley has defended the view that ‘while the past and present are real, the future is not.’ See Time, Tense, and Causation, 27. Cf. Q. Smith, Language and Time, 160-5. On 165, Smith writes: ‘I believe that if something possess [sic] a property, then it is past, present, or future’ and ‘we may say that ‘‘x exists’’ in the present tensed sense is not a necessary condition of present property possession.’ Zimmerman expresses concern that ‘the combination of rejecting Presentism while taking tense seriously is an unstable one.’ See ‘Temporary Intrinsics and Presentism,’ 212.

24 N. Markosian may argue that Presentism is inconsistent with temporal passage; see ‘How Fast Does Time Pass?’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993) 829-44. According to Markosian, ‘the passage thesis’ implies that ‘there are some properties [e.g. pastness, presentness, futurity] possessed by time, but not possessed by a dimension of space, in virtue of which it is true to say that time passes’ (830, 832). Markosian claims that times and events may be the bearers of these temporal properties such that (when Markosian wrote in 1993) ‘the year 2000 currently possesses the property being future, and that the 1984 World Series currently possesses the property being past’ (834). Because Presentism implies that there can exist no time or event other than those that presently exist or occur, Presentism is inconsistent with any Markosian-type account of temporal passage that requires times and events to be the bearers of pastness and futurity.

25 There is another reason to believe that Presentism and Static Time are inconsistent: P6 implies that all existings entities presently exist whereas Static Time implies that no existing s entities presently exist; so Presentism, if true, would guarantee that Static Time is false.

26 ‘What we can learn about space and time from the conflicting errors of the philosophers,’ Philosophical Investigations on Space, Time and the Continuum, B. Smith, trans., S. Korner and R.M. Chisholm, eds. (London: Croom Helm 1988), 174. In the same volume, see also ‘The Temporal As Relative,’ 106-7.

27 ‘Tense and Existence,’ 162

28 ‘On Passage and Persistence,’ 269-83. There were oversights in this earlier work: though we were silent with respect to Presentism, our defense of the time/identity linkage subtly presupposed that Transient Time implies Presentism. Thus, by affirming that Transient Time is correct, if and only if Endurance is correct, we thereby affirmed inadvertently the corresponding biconditional involving Presentism and Endurance.

29 Someone like Chisholm, who rejects both times and irreducible tenseless existence could formulate Endurance as follows: ‘It is possible that something persists; and the concept of a persisting entity is properly analyzed in terms of endurance, which involves an entity that both presently exists wholly (i.e. presently exists with all its parts) and did or will exist wholly.’

30 The perdurantist who rejects the existence of times could formulate Perdurance as follows: ‘It is possible that something persists; and the concept of persistence is properly analyzed in terms of perdurance, which involves a thing's having at least two different temporal parts such that one existss prior to the other.’

31 ‘Endurance and Indiscernibility,’ 168

32 Our objection to Merricks leaves open the possibility that the present is ‘thick’ — that, in accord with the doctrine of the specious present, the presentist might claim that two (or perhaps more) non-temporally-overlapping times can both presently exist.

33 Our reply may pose problems for Merricks, who apparently allows (in ‘Persistence, Parts, and Presentism,’ 429-31) that sizeable durations — e.g. a year or decade — can presently exist.

34 On the Plurality of Worlds, 204, 207

35 ‘On the Incompatibility of Enduring and Perduring Entities,’ 524

36 On the Plurality of Worlds, 204. See also Zimmerman, ‘Temporary Intrinsics and Presentism,’ 213 and Rea, ‘Temporal Parts Unmotivated,’ 242.

37 ‘Persistence, Parts, and Presentism,’ 423

38 ‘On Passage and Persistence,’ 273-6

39 Cf. B. Russell, ‘On Order in Time,’ Logic and Knowledge (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1971), 347. In this 1936 essay, Russell wrote that two events overlap in time if ‘neither is wholly before the other.’ Chisholm makes use of Russell's work in developing his own theory of the temporal; see A Realistic Theory of Categories, 60.

40 D3 allows that Mozart could have temporally overlapped with something that had an intermittent existence — with something that, say, existed in 1786 and 1788 but not in 1787. If there were such a thing, then it ceased to exist at the end of 1786, but did not then wholly cease to exist. Chisholm rejects intermittent existence; see ‘Reply to Dean W. Zimmerman,’ The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm, Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed. (Chicago: Open Court 1997), 103-4. See also J. Hoffman, ‘Locke on Whether One Thing Can Have Two Beginnings of Existence,’ Ratio 22 (1980), 106-11.

41 For their many helpful comments, we thank this journal's referees who, to us, remain anonymous.