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
1 - Presentism, Eternalism, and the Triviality Problem
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
It is often claimed that the debate between presentism and eternalism is merely verbal, because when we use tensed, detensed, or tenseless notions of existence, there is no difference in the accepted metaphysical statements between the adherents of both views. On the contrary, it is shown in this chapter that when we express their positions making use, in accordance with intentions of the presentists and the eternalists, of the tensed notion of existence (in the case of the presentists) and the detensed or tenseless notion (in the case of the eternalists), the controversy remains deep and very important for us, because both ontological claims express a different attitude to the existence of the flow of time. It is demonstrated that not only does the proposed approach to presentism and eternalism exactly express the intentions of the adherents of both views but it also offers a better understanding of them and explains at the same time the dynamism of the presentists’ ontology. The chapter takes for granted that we should assess metaphysical theories in a similar way as we assess scientific theories, that is on the basis of their explanatory value.
Introduction
The relation between existence and time seems to be one of the most difficult problems we face in metaphysics: the existence of the past, the present, and the future; the existence of the flow of time; the nature of persistence of physical objects over time; and the way timeless abstract objects exist are still being discussed. In addition, these are far from being wholly understood. The first of these problems, which is the central topic of this chapter, seems to be especially far from being solved in spite of the growing interest in it. Not only is it unresolved, it also looks as if we do not understand what we are arguing about. When we examine the main ontological theses of presentism and eternalism—saying that only the present thing exists, in the first case, or that the past, present, and future things exist in the same way (ontologically on a par), in the second—it is easy to get suspicious that both these ontological theses are trivially true or trivially false, according to how we understand the verb “exist”: in the tensed or in the detensed (or tenseless) way.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- In Defence of a Dynamic View of Reality , pp. 22 - 36Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2022