Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Presentism, Eternalism, and the Triviality Problem
- 2 Weak Interactions: Asymmetry of Time or Asymmetry in Time?
- 3 Presentism and the Flow of Time
- 4 Presentism and the Notion of Existence
- 5 Meyer’s Struggle with Presentism or How We Can Understand the Debate between Presentism and Eternalism
- 6 Dynamic Presentism and the Grounding Objection
- 7 Brute Past Presentism, Dynamic Presentism, and the Objection from Being-Supervenience
- 8 Entropy and the Direction of Time
- Bibliography
- Index of Subjects
- Index of Names
3 - Presentism and the Flow of Time
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Presentism, Eternalism, and the Triviality Problem
- 2 Weak Interactions: Asymmetry of Time or Asymmetry in Time?
- 3 Presentism and the Flow of Time
- 4 Presentism and the Notion of Existence
- 5 Meyer’s Struggle with Presentism or How We Can Understand the Debate between Presentism and Eternalism
- 6 Dynamic Presentism and the Grounding Objection
- 7 Brute Past Presentism, Dynamic Presentism, and the Objection from Being-Supervenience
- 8 Entropy and the Direction of Time
- Bibliography
- Index of Subjects
- Index of Names
Summary
This chapter examines the relations between presentism and the thesis concerning the existence of the flow of time. It tries to show that the presentist has to admit the existence of the passage of time and that the standard formulation of presentism as a singular thesis saying that only the present exists is insufficient because it does not allow the inference of the existence of the passage of time. Instead of this, the chapter proposes a formulation of presentism with the aid of the notion of becoming; not only does a formulation state the existence of the flow of time in such a way as to avoid the question of the rate of the passage of time, but it also allows the inference of the existence of only present things and events. The chapter demonstrates that the proposed conception of presentism also has other virtues, such as homogeneity, non-triviality, and ability to express dynamicity of presentists’ image of the world which testify for it.
Introduction
The issue of how we should grasp the relations between presentism and the existence of the flow of time is a vague and unclear one. Some philosophers assume a single, standard ontological thesis saying about the existence of only the present while others claim that an acceptable formulation of presentism should entail the temporal passage in the form of temporal becoming, and there are still others who claim that the thesis about the existence of the flow of time is a fundamental claim of presentism. There are even philosophers who claim that “Time does not pass given presentism.” So it is an important metaphysical problem which cries out for clarification.
The majority of presentists introduce their view simply in the form:
P1 Only the present exists;
or that
P2 Only the present is real.
Such forms of presentism were criticized as leading to the triviality problem. The problem consists in saying when we examine the ontological theses of presentism that only the present objects exist; it turns out that both these ontological theses are trivially true or trivially false, depending on the way in which we understand the verb “exists”: in a tensed or tenseless way.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- In Defence of a Dynamic View of Reality , pp. 56 - 67Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2022