Abstract
In several recent papers, Daniel Deasy has argued that the presentism–eternalism debate is unclear and should be abandoned. According to Deasy, there is no way of spelling out the predicate ‘is present’ that leads to a satisfactory definition of presentism: on some interpretations, presentism turns out to be compatible with eternalism, on others, it is clearly false or unacceptable for other reasons. The aim of this paper is to show that this line of argument should be resisted: if the predicate ‘is present’ is spelled out in terms of where things are located, the result is a definition of presentism that is neither compatible with eternalism nor clearly false. There is thus no need to abandon the debate between presentists and eternalists.
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Notes
Timothy Williamson (2013: pp. 24–25) puts forward a similar argument, claiming that the debate between presentists and eternalists is “hopelessly muddled” (25). In what follows, I will focus on Deasy’s version of the argument, as it is spelled out in much more detail than Williamson’s.
There are several other ways in which eternalists might try to block Deasy’s argument. For example, they could argue against (SP) or against the applicability of (SP) to apparently tenseless statements such as (NIM). I will leave the discussion of these options for another occasion. See Deasy (2017b: pp. 12–13) for a brief discussion of some options.
Nothing hangs on the terminological decision to admit instantaneous intervals. The principle could be amended to explicitly mention possible restrictions to instants or non-instantaneous intervals.
It is of course an idealisation that utterances are instantaneous. On a less idealised view of the duration of utterances, the restriction will be to a non-instantaneous interval of (a part of) the utterance. I will ignore this complication here.
Elsewhere, Sider (2001: pp. 26–27) discusses the question of whether presentists can treat certain operators as span-operators, i.e. operators that concern some extended span (or interval) of time. He concludes that “the presentist must employ the slice tense operators” (2001: p. 27) and holds that presentists thus face a challenge in analysing “sentences that concern multiple times taken together” (ibid.). Although Sider does not in this context discuss eternalism, his line of argument seems to presuppose that eternalists can do better in analysing such sentences. (IRP) offers one way of providing such analysis, and thus fits well with what Sider says about span-operators. See Lewis (2004) and Brogaard (2007) on whether presentists can employ span-operators.
Deasy is not alone in holding that eternalists accept (RP). Marshall (2016), for example, claims that eternalists “typically endorse” (2016: p. 8) analyses of tensed statements that are in line with (RP). According to Marshall, this leads to a puzzle for eternalists; given that eternalists do not in fact analyse tensed statements in the way Marshall claims, the puzzle dissolves.
Berit Brogaard (2007: p. 79) arrives at a very similar conclusion in her discussion of whether presentists can adopt span-operators (which concern intervals of time) or are confined to slice-operators (which concern instants of time), stating that “slice operators are often terrible candidates for the meaning of the English prefixes ‘it has been that’ and ‘it will be that’”.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for highlighting this point. Tallant (2014) expresses sympathy for Merricks’s view but does not explicitly rule out the existence of the present time.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful discussion and comments, I would like to thank Alexander Dinges, Hugh Mellor, Julia Zakkou, several anonymous referees, as well as audiences at the workshop New Developments in the Philosophy of Time in Bonn and at the DGPhil conference in Berlin. Work on this paper was supported by a postdoc fellowship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
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Viebahn, E. Presentism, eternalism and where things are located. Synthese 197, 2963–2974 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1816-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1816-6