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The Irrevocability of Being

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2012

J. J. Valberg
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Abstract

This paper aims first, to introduce and elaborate upon a certain principle about being (existence), roughly, that once something exists or has being, it cannot lose it: what is cannot, in this sense, unbe; and second, to apply this principle to a well-known issue in the philosophy of time, viz., that of whether future events, like past events, though of course not now occurring, nonetheless have being.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 87 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 65 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2012

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References

1 This point, which is embodied in the familiar rule of inference known as ‘existential instantiation’, explains why, when philosophers wish to deny the existence of a supposedly problematic type of entity (e.g. fictive entities, or abstract entities), they generally acknowledge responsibility for somehow explaining away the seeming possibility of referring to entities of the type in question.

2 Those who believe in an immortal soul will say that, after the death of Socrates, his soul continues to exist or be. What, we might ask, distinguishes the soul's immortality from the continued existence which belongs to everything that is, hence to the body of Socrates (the human being) as well as his soul? Presumably, the soul, as a non-material entity, is distinct from the body and thus, apart from its being in the unqualified sense, it has a purely temporal being that survives the disintegration of the body.

3 The point is due to G.E. Moore. See his ‘Is Existence a Predicate?’, Philosophical Papers (Collier Books, 1962)Google Scholar, 123.

4 Of course, someone who holds this view owes us an account of what is going on when, as it seems, we refer to such entities.

5 The Book Of Disquiet, trans. Watson, Ian (Quartet Books, 1991), 64–5Google Scholar.

6 See The Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 25, Fourth Article. A similar view about undoing the past and contradiction is expressed by Dummett, Michael in ‘Bringing About the Past’, Philosophical Review (1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Lewis, David, ‘The Paradoxes of Time Travel’, American Philosophical Quarterly (1976)Google Scholar.

7 See, e.g., Ryle's, Gilbert ‘It Was To Be’, Dilemmas (Cambridge University Press, 1954) (pro-asymmetry)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Ayer's, A.J. ‘Fatalism’ in The Concept Of A Person (Macmillan, 1964) (anti-asymmetry)Google Scholar.

8 For example, both the so-called ‘static’ view of time, in which the past/present/future contrast is somehow analyzed away or treated as merely subjective and events are assigned unchanging positions in a spatio-temporal manifold, as well as the ‘dynamic’ view, in which the contrast is conceived (a la McTaggart) as a movement of events from the future into the present/past, seem on reflection to assume that the totality of events is given ‘all at once’ – and thus to entail a temporal symmetry of being. C.D. Broad's view, on the other hand, wherein events acquire being in the temporal present, clearly entails a past/present versus future asymmetry being (see note 13, below).

9 The argument, let us emphasize,is not about the being of future individuals (like so-and-so's next child), nor about the truth of future-tensed propositions (like the proposition that there will be a sea battle tomorrow, but, to repeat, about the being of future events.

10 The existential quantifier is, of course, to be read tenselessly.

11 Metaphysical possibility is usually understood as, in a sense, falling between causal and logical possibility: what is metaphysically possible is thereby logically possible, but need not be causally possible; what is causally possible is thereby both metaphysically and logically possible; what is logically possible may be neither causally nor metaphysically possible.

12 Ryle, in the paper cited above, muddies the waters by presenting fatalism as if it depended on the denial of the asymmetry.

13 This means that an event's ‘coming to be’ cannot be conceived as a change on the part of the event or as something that happens to it. See Broad's, C.D. discussion of ‘absolute becoming’ in his An Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1938), II, Part IGoogle Scholar.

14 Donald Davidson remarks: ‘If I turned on the light, then I must have done it at a precise moment, in a particular way – every detail is fixed. But it makes no sense to demand that my want be directed at an action performed at any one moment or done in some unique manner.’ (‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’, in Essays on Actions & Events (Oxford University Press, 1986), 6Google Scholar. Why does it not ‘make sense’ etc.? It is not because the particular action at which my want is directed is somehow indeterminate, but, I would say, because, being future-directed, there is no particular action at which my want is directed (rather, it is directed at my performing an action of a certain kind.)

15 Where ‘t’ stands for the time of the relevant gong, and ‘O’ for occurring, God's choosing our actual world would, on the assumption of symmetry, entail that (Эe)(Ge & Oe,t); on the assumption of asymmetry, it would entail, instead, that it will be the case that (Эe)(Ge & Oe,t).