Abstract
In his review of The Ontology of Time, Thomas Crisp (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2005a) argues that Oaklander's version of McTaggart's paradox does not make any trouble for his version of presentism. The aim of this paper is to refute that claim by demonstrating that Crisp's version of presentism does indeed succumb to a version of McTaggart's argument. I shall proceed as follows. In Part I I shall explain Crisp's view and then argue in Part II that his analysis of temporal becoming, temporal properties and temporal relations is inadequate. Finally, in Part III, I shall demonstrate that his presentist ontology of time is susceptible to the paradox he so assiduously sought to avoid.
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Notes
For a complete discussion of my interpretation of McTaggart’s positive and negative accounts of time see (Oaklander 2004d).
See, Michael Tooley (1997: 323–329) and (2010) for a defense of this way out of McTaggart’s Paradox. Note that the presentist cannot take this way out for two closely connected reasons: first, for presentists the basic sentences and the propositions they express do not contain dates and second, there are no past or future dates or times.
In the papers I am discussing Crisp refers to singular terms, but he does not tell us if he is thinking only of singular terms that refer to presently existing objects, or whether, for example, "Abraham Lincoln" is also a singular term for Crisp. In other words, is Crisp employing non-referring singular terms? If so, how are such terms to be understood? As disguised definite descriptions? Crisp addresses some of these concerns in (2005b).
This point depends crucially upon the claim that Crisp is analyzing abstract times in terms of propositions related to sets of tenseless propositions. I have argued, however, that interpretation of Crisp is the right one.
A referee pointed out the following difficulty with Crisp’s analysis here. Crisp analyzes the proposition that a time, X, is present in terms of the proposition that X is true. But given that the universe could repeat itself, this doesn't look like a satisfactory analysis, since in a universe that repeated itself, more than one time could, so to speak, be present at a given time, since on Crisp's definition of times, there could be two or more times that consisted of precisely the same set of propositions.
In (2005b) Crisp does claims that the present time is the time that is NOW (or has NOWNESS), but he abandons that view in (2005a and 2007) since he wants to completely eliminate A-properties from his ontology in order to give what he believes is an adequate account of temporal relations and to answer the grounding objection.
(B) follows from Crisp’s analysis of WAS(x) given that tα is the present time is interpreted as tα has the property of being present (which it is in his account of temporal becoming).
Crisp objects to my use of McTaggart to refute presentism because of unwarranted assumptions he says I make. For example,
Pick two times t 1 and t 2 such that t 2 is later than t 1 and suppose that t 1 has being present and that WILL[t 2 has being present]. Oaklander’s argument seems to presuppose that a proposition like [t 1 has being present and WILL[t 2 has being present]] is true only if the relevant t 1 and t 2 both have being present. But why think that? (2005a)
The answer as follows: Consider the proposition [t 1 has being present and WILL[t 2 has being present]] Since in both sentences “has” is underlined, it follows that each conjunct in the proposition expressed is tenseless. Thus, if we suppose that t2 is later than t1, then the proper analysis of the proposition in question is that [t2 has being present is true at a time later than the present time (t1)] is equivalent to [t2 has being present later than t1 has being present]. Admittedly, it does not follow that t2 and t1 are both present simultaneously or timelessly, but neither does it follow that either time is NOW present or always present, but only that t2 and t1 have being present one later than, the other earlier than the other. This conclusion wrecks havoc on Crisp’s presentism for then there is no ground for distinguishing the present time from the past or future time and thus no way of distinguishing the times that did or will represent the world from those times that NOW represent the world. Without such an account however, there is nothing about his view that renders it an A-theory of time and since it is clearly not a B-theory of time (since he rejects B-relations between temporal items), there is nothing about his account that renders it an ontology of time.
This objection was raised by one of the referees.
References
Craig, W. L. (1998). McTaggart’s paradox and the problem of temporary intrinsics. Analysis, 58, 122–127.
Craig, W. L. (2000). The tensed of time: A critical examination. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Crisp, T. (2007). Presentism and the grounding objection. NOÛS, 41(1), 90–109.
Crisp, T. (2005a). Review L. Nathan Oaklander, The ontology of time. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=2201.
Crisp, Thomas. (2005b). Presentism. In Loux Michael & Zimmerman Dean (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of metaphysics (pp. 211–245). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003.
Oaklander, L. N. (2004a). Craig on McTaggart's Paradox and the Problem of Temporary Intrinsics, in The Ontology of Time (pp. 77-83). Amherst: Prometheus Books.
Oaklander, L. N. (2004b). Presentism, ontology, and temporal experience. The Ontology of Time, 83–101.
Oaklander, L. N. (2004c). Presentism: a critique. The Ontology of Time, 101–117.
Oaklander, L. N. (2004d). McTaggart's paradox defended. The Ontology of Time, 51–62.
Tooley, M. (1997). Time tense and causation. Oxford: Clarendon.
Tooley, M. (2010). Farewell to McTaggart’s argument? Philosophia.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank V. Alan White and Joshua Mozersky for the very helpful discussions I had with them, and two anonymous referees for their constructive comments.
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Oaklander, L.N. McTaggart’s Paradox and Crisp’s Presentism. Philosophia 38, 229–241 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-009-9222-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-009-9222-4