Aporetics – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

Notes on Nicholas Rescher, “Nonexistents Then and Now”

0. This entry is relevant to my ongoing dialog with Dr. Novak about reference to the nonexistent. I hope he has the time and the stamina to continue the discussion. I have no doubt that he has the 'chops.' I thank him for the stimulation. We philosophize best with friends, as Aristotle says somewhere. But to the Peripatetic is also attributed the thought that amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas.

The Rescher text under scrutiny is from a chapter in his Scholastic Meditations, Catholic UP, 2005, 126-148.

1. One objection I have is that Rescher tends to conflate the epistemological with the ontological. A careful reading of the following passage shows the conflation at work. I have added comments in brackets in blue. Bolding added, italics in original.

To begin, note that a merely possible world is never given. It is not something we can possibly encounter in experience. The only world that confronts us in the actual course of things is the real world, this actual world of ours — the only world to which we gain entry effortlessly, totally free of charge. [This is practically a tautology. All Rescher is saying is that the only world we can actually experience is the actual world, merely possible worlds being, by definition, not actual.] To move from it, we must always do something, namely, make a hypothesis — assumption, supposition, postulation, or the like. The route of hypotheses affords the only cognitive access to the realm of nonexistent possibility. [Rescher's wording suggests that there is a realm of nonexistent possibility and that we can gain cognitive access to it.] For unlike the real and actual world, possible worlds never come along of themselves and become accessible to us without our actually doing something, namely, making an assumption or supposition or such-like. Any possible world with which we can possibly deal will have to be an object of our contrivance – of our making by means of some supposition or assumption. [In this last sentence Rescher clearly slides from an epistemological claim, one about how we come to know the denizens of the realm of nonexistent possibility, to an ontological claim about what merely possible worlds and their denizens ARE, namely, objects of our contrivance.](131)

Rescher wants to say about the merely possible what he says about the purely fictional, namely, that pure ficta are objects of our contrivance. But this too, it seems to me, is an illicit conflation. The purely fictional is barred from actuality by its very status as purely fictional: Sherlock Holmes cannot be actualized. What cannot be actualized is not possible; it is impossible. Sherlock Holmes is an impossible item. He is impossible because he is incomplete. Only the complete (completely determinate) is actualizable. Sherlock is incomplete because he is the creation of a finite fiction writer: Sherlock has all and only the properties ascribed to him by Conan Doyle. Not even divine power could bring about the actualization of the Sherlock of the Conan Doyle stories. What God could do is bring about the actualization of various individuals with all or some of Sherlock's properties. None of those individuals, however, would be Sherlock. Each of them would differ property-wise from Sherlock.

2. The conflation of the merely possible with the purely fictional is connected with another mistake Rescher makes. Describing the "medieval mainstream," (129) Rescher lumps mere possibilia and pure ficta together as entia rationis. For this mistake, Daniel Novotny takes him to task, explaining that "Suarez and most other Baroque scholastics considered merely possible beings to be real, and hence they were not classified as beings of reason." (Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel, Fordham UP, 2013, p. 27) Entia rationis, beings of reason, are necessarily mind-dependent impossible objects. Mere possibilia are not, therefore, entia rationis.

3. As I understand it, the problem of the merely possible is something like this. Merely possible individuals and states of affairs are not nothing, nor are they fictional. And of course their possibility is not merely epistemic, or parasitic upon our ignorance. Merely possible individuals and states of affairs have some sort of mind-independent reality. But how the devil can we make sense of this mind-independent reality given that the merely possible, by definition, is not actual? Suppose we cast the puzzle in the mold of an aporetic triad:

a. The merely possible is not actual.

b. The merely possible is real (independently of finite minds).

c. Whatever is real is actual.

Clearly, the members of this trio cannot all be true. Any two of them, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of the remaining one. For example, the conjunction of the last two propositions entails the negation of the first.

What are the possible solutions given that the triad is genuinely logically inconsistent and given that the triad is soluble? I count exactly five possible solutions.

S1. Eliminativism. The limbs are individually undeniable but jointly inconsistent, which is to say: there are no mere possibilia. One could be an error theorist about mere possibilia. On this solution we deny the common presupposition of (a) and (b), namely, that there are merely possible individuals and states of affairs.

S2. Conceptualism. Deny (b) while accepting the other two limbs. There are mere possibilia, but what they are are conceptual constructions by finite minds. This is essentially Rescher's view. See his A Theory of Possibility: A Constructivistic and Conceptualistic Theory of Possible Individuals and Possible Worlds (Basil Blackwell, 1975). He could be described as an artifactualist about possibilities: "A possible individual is an intellectual artifact: the product of a projective 'construction' . . . ." (p. 61)

S3. Actualism/Ersatzism. Deny (a) while accepting the other two limbs. One looks for substitute entities — actual entities — to go proxy for the mere possibles. Thus, on one approach, the merely possible state of affairs of there being a unicorn is identified with an actual abstract entity, the property of being a unicorn. For the possibility to be actual is for the the property to be instantiated.

On this version of actualism, the mind-independent reality of the merely possible is identified with the mind-independent reality of certain actual abstract items. In this way one avoids both eliminativism and constructivism.

S4. Extreme Modal Realism. Deny (c) while accepting the other two limbs. David Lewis. There is a plurality of possible worlds conceived of as maximal merelogical sums of concreta. The worlds and their inhabitants are all equally real. But no world is absolutely actual. Each is merely actual at itself. In this world, I am a philosopher. On extreme modal realism, the possibility of my being an electrical engineer instead is understood as various counterparts of me being electrical engineers in various possible worlds.

S5. Theologism. Deny (c) while accepting the other two limbs. We bring God into the picture to secure the reality of the possibles instead of a plurality of equally real worlds. Consider the possibility of there being unicorns. This is a mere possibility since it is not actual. But the possibility is not nothing: it is a definite possibility, a real possibility that does not depend for its reality on finite minds. There aren't any unicorns, but there really could have been some, and the fact of this mere possibility has nothing to do with what we do or think or say. The content of the possibility subsists as an object of the divine intellect, and its actualizability is grounded in God's power. We could perhaps say that possibilia enjoy esse intentionale in or before the divine intellect, but lack esse reale unless the divine will actualizes them.

4. Part of Rescher's support for his constructivism/conceptualism/artifactualism is his attack on the problem of transworld identity. For Rescher, "the issue of transworld identity actually poses no real problems — a resolution is automatically available." Rescher's argument is hard to locate due to his bloated, meandering, verbose style of writing. Rescher rarely says anything in a direct and pithy way if he can pad it out with circumlocutions and high-falutin' phraseology. (I confess to sometimes being guilty of this myself.)

But basically such argument as I can discern seems to involve equivocation on such terms as 'individuation' and 'identity' as between epistemological and ontological senses. He gives essentially the following argument on p. 141. This is my reconstruction and is free of equivocation.

A. All genuine individuals are complete.

B. All merely possible individuals are complete only if completely describable by us.

C. No merely possible individuals are completely describable by us.

Therefore

D. No merely possible individuals are genuine individuals.

But why should we accept (B)? Why can't there be nonexistent individuals that are complete? Rescher just assumes that the properties of such individuals must be supplied by us. But that is to beg the question against those who believe in the reality of the merely possible. He just assumes the truth of artifactualism about the merely possible. Consider the following sentences

d. Bill Clinton is married to Hillary Rodham.

e. Bill Clinton remained single.

f. Bill Clinton married someone distinct from Hillary Rodham.

Only the first sentence is true, but, I want to say, the other two are possibly true: they pick out merely possible states of affairs. There are three possible worlds involved: the actual world and two merely possible worlds. Now does 'Bill Clinton' pick out the same individual in each of these three worlds? I am inclined to say yes, despite the fact that we cannot completely describe the world in which our boy remains single or the world in which he marries someone other than Hillary. But Rescher will have none of this because his conceptualism/constructivism/ artifactualism bars him from holding that actual individuals in merely possible worlds or merely possible individuals have properties other that those we hypothesize them as having. So, given the finitude of our hypothesizing, actual individuals in merely possible worlds, or merely possible individuals, can only be incomplete items, multiply realizable schemata, and thus not genuine individuals. But then the possible is assimilated to the fictional.

5, How solve the triad? Novak will put God to work and adopt something along the lines of (S5). I am inclined to say that the problem, while genuine, is insoluble, and that the aporetic triad is a genuine aporia.

The Aporetics of Existence: Do Existing Things Have Existence?

A reader inquires,

I have been wondering about whether existing things have existence. This seems obvious to me, but Bradley's regress makes me think twice. For if existing things have existence, then given that existence exists, existence also has existence. And since this latter existence also exists, it also has existence. And so on.

What do you make of this problem?

There is a problem here, but since Bradley's regress concerns relations, we can leave Mr. Bradley out of it. And there is a problem even if there is no vicious infinite regress. (Not every infinite regress is vicious; some are, if not virtuous, at least benign.) Here is the problem as I see it. We start with a datum and we end with a paradox.

1) This table in front of me exists.

2) The table exists, but it might not have, which is to say that it exists contingently. There is no metaphysical necessity that it exist.

3) What accounts for the contingency of the thing's existence? Equivalently, what accounts for the real possibility of the thing's nonexistence? (A real possibility is one that is not epistemic or factitious.)

4) A classical answer is in terms of a distinction between the thing and its existence/existing. This distinction is not merely excogitated by us but corresponds to a difference in reality; it is therefore called a real distinction. 'Real' is from res, thing. A contingent being, then, is one in which essence and existence are really distinct in the sense that, in reality or extra-mentally, the existence/existing of the being is no part of what the thing is. A non-contingent being is one that is either impossible or necessary, and a necessary being is one whose existence is part of what the thing is. God is the prime example of a necessary being. In God essence and existence are one, which is to say: in God, there is no real distinction between essence and existence.

5) Pace Giles of Rome, however, the real distinction between a thing and its existence is not a distinction between two things metaphysically capable of independent existence. A thing metaphysically capable of independent existence is by definition a substance. Clearly, my table is not a collection of two substances, one its essence, the other its existence. Hence the distinction between a thing and its existence is not at all like the distinction between my eye glasses and my head or that between my table and the chair in front of it. They are really distinct and separable. The table and its existence are really distinct but inseparable. The latter distinction is more like the distinction between the concavity and convexity of a lens. It is a real distinction, but neither term of the distinction can exist without the other.

Therefore

6) If the individual essence of the table (its whaness or quiddity in the broad sense) is the concrete table taken in abstraction from its existence, then, pace Avicenna and his latter-day colleague Alexius von Meinong, this essence does not itself exist. The same holds for the existence of the table: it does not itself exist. What exists is the concrete table which is composed of essence and existence as mutually dependent ontological factors. If you think otherwise, and think of essence and existence as substances in their own right, then you have committed the fallacy of hypostatization or reification. (The only difference is that between Greek and Latin.)

7) If the existence of the table does not itself exist, is the existence of the table nothing at all? The existence of a thing is that in virtue of which it exists. If you say that the existence of a thing is nothing at all, then either (i) the table does not exist, contrary to fact, or (ii) the existence of the table is (identically) the table, in which case we have no account of the contingency of the thing. Argument for (i): the existence of my table is that in virtue of which my table exists; ergo, if the existence of my table is nothing at all, then my table is nothing at all and does not exist, which is contrary to our datanic starting point. Argument for (ii): For the table to be contingent, it must be really distinct from its existence: if its essence were identical to its existence it would be a necessary being. (God is a necessary being precisely because there is no distinction in him between essence and existence. Of course, we cannot think about God without distinguishing God's essence or nature and God's existence; but this distinction finds no purchase in God: it is a necessary makeshift in the sense that without it we cannot think of God.)

8) The paradox is now upon us. With respect to contingent beings, we seem forced to say that the existence of such a being both is (exists) and is not (does not exist). Both limbs of this aporetic dyad are reasonably asserted. But of course a contradiction cannot be true. Of course. That is why the dyad is an aporia, an impasse that the discursive intellect cannot negotiate. No way, man!

Limb One. To explain the contingency of the table we have to distinguish the (individual) essence of the concrete table from its existence. It would avail nothing to bring in talk of possible worlds and say that a contingent being is one that exists in some but not all possible worlds. For 'possible worlds' are merely a representational device to render graphic modal relationships. (I cannot explain this any further now. See my Modality category.) So if we want to explain the contingency of concrete particulars and not leave it unexplained, then it seems we must distinguish between the thing (or the essence of the thing) and the thing's existence. Therefore, the thing's existence/existing cannot be nothing. It must exist.

Limb Two. There are no bare existents: necessarily, whatever exists has a nature or at least some quidditative properties. So if the existence of my table itself exists, then it has a nature. The nature it would have, presumably would be that of a table, not that of a turnip or a valve-lifter. But then we have two tables, which is absurd. The pressure is on to say that the existing of the thing is nothing at all.

The paradox is that both halves of the contradiction are rationally defensible.

Is there a solution?

If there is a solution, I'd like to know what it is. Please don't say that the existence of the table is one of its properties, a property that does not exist on its own, and is therefore not a substance, but only in the table in the manner of an accident or in the manner of an immanent universal. If S is a substance, and A is an accident of S, then A cannot be the existence of S for the simple reason that S must already (logically speaking) exist if it is to support any accident, including the putative accident of existence. Similarly if you try to assay existence as an immanent first-level universal. If a property is defined as an instantiable entity, then existence cannot be understood as a property of existing particulars. This is because the particular must already exist to be in a position to instantiate any properties including the putative property of existence. (Bear in mind what I said above about Avicenna and Meinong.) Existence is not a first-level property. I have given just one argument among several.

And please don't say that existence is a property of properties, the property of being instantiated. This is the Frege-Russell theory which I have subjected to thorough critique many times on this blog and in print. Here is one very simple argument. If the existence of a concrete particular a is some property's being instantiated, the only property that could fill the bill is the haecceity property a-ness. But there are no haecceity properties. Ergo, etc.

We are stuck with our paradox: The existence/existing of an existing thing neither is (exists) nor is not (does not exist).

A bowl of menudo and a Corona if you can solve it.

Can a Dead Animal be Buried?

Arguably not. Here is an argument:

1) A dead animal can be buried if and only if it is identical to its corpse.

2) A dead animal is not identical to its corpse.

Therefore

3) It is not the case that a dead animal can be buried.

Argument for (2):

4) If a dead animal is identical to its corpse, then it survives its death as a corpse.

5) No animal survives its death as a corpse.

Therefore

2) A dead animal is not identical to its corpse.

Suppose you hear that I was involved in a terrible auto accident. You ask whether I survived. You get the response, "Yes, here he is in the morgue. The good news is that he survived; the bad news is that he is dead." If you find that response absurd, then you will accept (5) and with it (3), and you will understand that a dead animal cannot be buried. You will agree that you cannot bury me, "on the lone prarie" or anywhere; you can only bury my corpse which is not me. Even if I am only a living human body, I am not identical to 'my' corpse either before death or after it.

When an animal dies, it ceases to exist, and you cannot bury what does not exist.

But intuitions differ. Suppose that a 200 lb. man dies in his bed, and that a man is just a living material thing. If the man ceased to exist at death, but the 200 lb. mass in the bed did not, then something new came into existence in the bed, a corpse. If that sounds absurd, you may be tempted to say that one and the same thing that was alive is now dead, and that that one thing will be buried. So you did bury old Uncle Joe after all and not merely his remains. And the old cowboy's request not to be buried on the lone prarie, where the coyotes howl and wind blows free, makes sense.

Welcome to the aporetics of death and burial.

Which Side Are You On?

A snatch of dialog in illustration of the aporetics of our political predicament:

A. It's a war! Don't say anything bad about our guys! Which side are you on? Don't preface your defense of Trump by conceding that he has these and these negative qualities. Don't give ammo to the enemy! In a gunfight against a home invader would you allow your enemy time to re-load, in the interests of a fair fight? Hell no! He is in the wrong and you are in the right. He is out to kill you. You must stop him, and if that ends up killing him, so be it.

B. But then truth and objectivity go out the window. Onesidedness and blind partisanship rule. Oppositions intensify. Polarization increases. Polarization issues in demonization. We need to come together and work together. Trump is deeply flawed. How can you blind yourself to his flaws?

A. This is a war, not a gentlemanly discussion, or an attempt at an objective personality assessment. You cannot be objective and conciliatory in a war. You must defeat the enemy before he defeats you. Trump is all we have. Can't you see that? Your attempt to be fair and conciliatory and reasonable and 'moral' will be taken as a sign of weakness and will only embolden our enemies on the Left. We cannot 'come together' with them because there is no common ground on which to do so. They do not share out values. The enemy is committed to our destruction.

B. So you are OK with any and all means sufficient to destroy the enemy? Do the ends justify the means? Were the Allied atrocities during World War II justified by the good outcome?

A. I don't like saying yes, yes, and yes, but I fear that I have to. This is the problem of dirty hands. The buck stopped with President Harry Truman. Would you not have ordered the use of nuclear weapons against Japanese population centers? Or, comfortable in your ivory tower, would you have taken the position of Elizabeth Anscombe possibly sacrificing civilization itself to a just war THEORY? Which is better known, the premises on which Just War doctrine depends, or the consequences of Allied defeat and Axis victory?

B. This is scary stuff. Isn't there some alternative to war?

A. And what might that be? I see only three alternatives to war, none of them good. One can attempt to WITHDRAW from the fight. Head for the hills. Build alternative communities and hope to be left alone. Unfortunately, the totalitarians, being totalitarians, won't leave us alone. That's not 'who they are.'

Or one can accept POLITICAL DHIMMITUDE.

Finally, one can attempt the POLITICAL EQUIVALENT OF DIVORCE, whether through secession, partition, a return to federalism, or something else.

B. Those are the only options?

A. As far as I can see.

Is Disunion in Our Future?

Something about Nothing

Consider the following contradictory propositions:

1) Something exists.

2) Nothing exists.

(1) is plainly true. It follows that (2) is false. So much for truth value. What about modal status? Is (1) contingent or necessary? If (1) is contingent, then its negation is possible, in which case it is possible that (2) be true. If (1) is necessary, then it is not possible that (2) be true.

Is it possible that nothing exist? Is it possible that there be nothing at all? Arguably not, since if there were nothing at all, that would be the case: that would be that obtaining state of affairs, in which case there would be one 'thing,' namely, that state of affairs.

Therefore, it is impossible that there be nothing at all. It follows that it is necessary that something (at least one thing) exist.

A strict Pyrrhonian would have to say that there is an argument that cancels out the one just given.

Is there?

A Reader Poses a Question about the Extent of My Solubility Skepticism

M.M. writes,

I understand that your method is aporetic – you argue that the great problems of philosophy are genuine problems but also insoluble, at least by us here below.

[. . .]

My question is: do you think that — even if all positions in some metaphysical disputes have their problems — we can weight reasons for one position against other and make reasoned choice which is partially voluntaristic but also theoretically superior against other options?

Yes. Not all problems are insoluble; not all questions are unaswerable. Let the question be: Are there beliefs? Along comes an eliminativist who give the following argument:

(1) If beliefs are anything, then they are brain states; (2) beliefs exhibit original intentionality; (3) no physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits original intentionality; therefore (4) there are no beliefs.

But any reasonable person should be able to see that this argument does not establish (4) but is instead more reasonably taken to be a reductio ad absurdum of premise (1) according to which beliefs are nothing if not brain states. For if anything is obvious, it is that there are beliefs. This is a pre-theoretical datum, a given. What they are is up for grabs, but that they are is a starting point that cannot be denied except by those in the grip of a scientistic ideology. Since the argument is valid in point of logical form, and the conclusion is manifestly false, what the argument shows is that beliefs cannot be brain states. (I am assuming that we accept both (2) and (3).)

I conclude that not all problems are such that the arguments pro et contra cancel out so as to leave an intellectually honest person in a state of doxastic equipoise. I hold that this is the case only for a set of core problems, the great problems as my reader calls them, the problems that have humbled the greatest minds.

Contrast the question of the existence of beliefs with the question of the existence of God. Deny beliefs and I show you the door. Deny God, and I listen attentively to your arguments.

Presentism: Safe Passage between Tautology and Absurdity?

Can presentism navigate between the Scylla of tautology and the Charybdis of absurdity? Let's see. We begin with a datum, a given, a Moorean deliverance that I think most would be loath to deny:

DATUM: if it is true that a was F, or that a F'ed, then it was true that a is F, or that a Fs.

For example, if it is true that John F. Kennedy was in Dallas on 22 November 1963, then it was true on that date that he is in Dallas on that date. For a second example, if it is true that Socrates drank hemlock, then it was true that Socrates drinks hemlock.

It follows that the present present cannot be the only present: there had to have been past presents, past times that were once present. For example there was the present when JFK was assassinated. That is a past present. Only what was once present could now be past. Suppose you deny this. Then are you saying that there are past items that were never present. But that cannot be right. For the past is the present that has passed away. It cannot be the case that the event of Kennedy's assassination was always past and never present. There was a time when it was present and a time before that when it was future. When Kennedy was inaugurated, his assassination was future; when Johnson was sworn in, his asassination was past.

Bear in mind that presentism is an A-theory. This implies that among times there is a privileged time that is absolutely or non-relationally present. So while every time is present at itself, only one time is present absolutely. This time instantiates the monadic (non-relational) property of absolute temporal presentness. This absolute property is temporary, not permanent.

So what is the presentist maintaining? He cannot be maintaining that

P-Taut: Only present items presently exist

for this is not a substantive metaphysical claim contradicted by the eternalist's substantive denial, but a mere tautology. Nor can he be telling us that

P-Solip: Only presently present items exist simpliciter.

For this is solipsism of the present moment, a bizarre if not lunatic thesis. It amounts to the claim that all that ever existed, all that exists, and all that will ever exist exists now, where 'now' is a rigid designator of the present moment, the moment at which I am writing and you are reading. If our presentist pals are not solipsists of the present moment, then they cannot be saying that only what exists at the present present exists simpliciter, and so they they must be telling us that only what exists at a given present (whether past, present, or future) exists. Thus

P-Always: At every time t, only what is present at t, exists simpliciter.

This seems to do the trick. What is says is that, at every time t, only what is temporally present at t belongs in the ontological inventory, the catalog of what there is.

Thinking a little deeper, however, (P-Always) seems contradictory: it implies that at each time there are no non-present times and that at each time there are non-present times. For if one quantifies over all times, then one quantifies over present and non-present times in which case there are all these times including non-present times. But the bit following the quantifier in (P-Always) takes this back by stating that only what is present at a given time exists simpliciter.

It is obvious that (P-Taut) and (P-Solip) are nonstarters. So we are driven to (P-Always). But it is contradictory. The presentist wants to limit the ontological inventory, the catalog of what exists, to temporally present items. To avoid both tautology and the solipsism of the present moment, however, he is forced to admit that what exists cannot be limited to the present. For he is forced to quantify over times that are not present in order to achieve a formulation that avoids both (P-Taut) and (P-Solip).

The presentist needs the 'always' to avoid Scylla and Charybdis, but it doesn't keep him from drowning. He is forced to jump out of his privileged temporal perspective from within time and view matters sub specie aeternitatis. He is forced into an illict combination of a privileged perspective within time with a view from No When, a view from outside of time. The perspectives cannot be integrated, and therein lies the root of the problem.

My interim conclusion is that presentism makes no clear sense. This does not support eternalism, however, for it has its own problems.

Being and Time: Another Presentist Puzzle

One type of presentism makes a double-barreled claim about the Being of all beings: All beings are (i) in time (ii) at the present time. There is nothing 'outside' of time, and the there is nothing 'outside' of the present time. To be just is to be temporally present. Being = Presentness. Since identity is symmetrical, the property identity proposition expressed by the immediately preceding sentence does not fully convey what I want to convey. What I want to convey is that Being reduces to Temporal Presentness on the type of presentism now being considered. (If A reduces to B, it does not follow that B reduces to A.)

The presentism under discussion is involved in a double restriction: Items in general are restricted to temporal items, and then temporal items are restricted to present items. And all of this as a matter of metaphysical necessity.

What then do we say about the Berlin Wall? It is wholly past. Being past, it is in time. For, by definition, an item is in time just in case it is the subject of a temporal predicate, whether a monadic A-determination, or a relational B-property. The Wall is the subject of the predicate 'past', which is true of it; ergo, the Wall is in time. To put the point B-theoretically, the Wall is such that, every time at which it existed is a time earlier than the present time. Ergo, the Wall is in time.

On the other hand, being past, the Wall is nothing. Presentism implies that the passage of time has consigned the Wall to the abyss of nonbeing. For if Being reduces to Presentness, and an item is wholly past, then said item is nothing. But if the Wall is nothing, then it has no properties, including the monadic property of being past, and the relational property of being earlier that the present, whence it follows that the Wall is not in time.

So the Wall is both in time and not in time. It is in time, because 'wholly past' is true of it. It is not in time for the reason given in the immediately preceding paragraph.

Presentism, as a thesis about the very Being of all beings, restricts everything to the present time, including the temporal modes, past and future. In so doing, presentism negates itself by eliminating time. For there is no time if there are no distinctions among past, present, and future.

Continuing the Discussion of Time, Tense, and Existence

This just in from London. I've intercalated my responses.

Here is another take. We agree on our disagreement about the following consequence

(A) X is no longer temporally present, therefore X has ceased to exist.

You think it is not valid, i.e. you think the antecedent could be true with the consequent false. I think it is valid.

BV: Yes. So far, so good.

However regarding

(B) X is no longer temporally present, therefore X does not still exist

we seem to agree. We both think the antecedent cannot be true with the consequent false.

BV: Right. For example, we agree BOTH that the Berlin Wall is no longer temporally present (and is therefore temporally past) AND that the Berlin Wall does not still exist. I should think that we also, as competent speakers of English, agree that locutions of the form 'X still exists' are intersubstitutable both salva veritate and salva significatione with locutions of the form 'X existed and X exists' where all of the verbs are tensed and none are tense-neutral or tenseless. Agree? My second comment has no philosophical implications. It is merely a comment on the meaning/use of a stock English locution.

My puzzle is that my reading, and I think a natural reading, is that (A) and (B) mean the same, because “X has ceased to exist” and “X does not still exist” mean the same. You clearly disagree.

BV: If we stick to tensed language, then 'X has ceased to exist' and 'X does not still exist' mean the same. So I don't disagree if we adhere to tensed language. But note that 'X has ceased to exist' is ambiguous as between

a) X has ceased to presently-exist (or present-tensedly exist)

and

b) X has ceased to be anything at all (and thus has become nothing at all).

For example, the Berlin Wall has ceased to presently-exist. But it doesn't follow that said wall has become nothing, that it is no longer a member of the totality of entities, that it has been annihilated by the mere passage of time. If you think that it is no longer a member of said totality, then you are assuming presentism and begging the question against me. You have restricted the totality of what exists to what presently exists. Note that I do not deny that one can move validly from the premise of (A) to its conclusion if one invokes presentism as an auxiliary premise. My claim is that the inference fails as a direct or immediate inference.

I think you want to argue that there is a covert tensing in “X does not still exist” which is absent in “X has ceased to exist”, which (according to you) is tenseless. But how? Doesn’t the verb ‘cease’ always imply a time at which X ceased to exist? Would it make sense to say that 2+2 has ceased to equal 4? How?

BV: In 'X does not still exist,' 'exist' is present-tensed. But 'X has ceased to exist' is ambiguous as explained above . It can be read your tensed way, but it can also be read in my tenseless way. Surely you don't want to say that 'exists' has exactly the same meaning /sense as 'exists-now' or 'exists' (present tense). We could call that semantic presentism. I don't think anyone is a semantic presentist. And for good reason. You, as a nominalist, will not countenance abstracta such as numbers and sets and the other denizens of the Platonic menagerie. But you understand what you are opposing when you oppose their admission into our ontology in the Quinean sense (our catalog by category of what there is). And so you understand the notion of tenseless existence and tenseless property possession as when a 'Platonist' says that 7 is prime. The copula is tenseless, not present-tensed.

So, in summary, my problem (and I am always seeing problems) is how you think (A) and (B) differ.

Over to you.

BV: The Boston Blizzard of '78 was one hell of a storm. When it ended, did it cease to exist? Yes of course, if we are using 'exist' in the ordinary present-tensed way. The storm because wholly past, and in becoming wholly past it stopped being presently existent. Obviously, nothing can exist at present if it is wholly past. And it is quite clear that what no longer is present is not still present, and that what no longer presently exists is not still presently existent.

So far, nothing but platitudes of ordinary usage. Nothing metaphysical.

We venture into metaphysics when we ask: Does it follow straightaway from the storm's having become wholly temporally past, that it is nothing at all? I say No. If you say Yes, then you are endorsing presentism, a controversial metaphysical theory.

You can avoid controversy if you stick to ordinary language. If you have trouble doing this, Wittgensteinian therapy may be helpful.

Presentism and the Determinacy of the Past

On presentism, the present alone exists, and not in the trivial sense that the present alone exists at present, but in the substantive sense that the present alone exists simpliciter. But if so, then the past is nothing, a realm of sheer nonbeing. But surely the past is not nothing: it happened, and is in some sense 'there' to be investigated by historians and archeologists and paleontologists.

If our presentist cannot accommodate the reality of the past, then his position is hopeless. He might say this: the past is real, but its reality is wholly contained in the present. The causal traces of past events in the present constitutes the entire reality of the past. Will this work? No. There simply aren't enough causal traces!

On the principle of bivalence, every proposition is either true, or if not true, then false. Given that bivalence holds for what presently exists, it is difficult to see how it could fail to hold for what did exist. Why should the present, which is wholly determinate, become less than wholly determinate when it becomes past? However things stand with the future, one reasonably views the past as a realm of reality and thus as wholly determinate.

Our knowledge of the past is spotty, but not the past itself. It was, and I would add: it actually was. When a thing passes away it does not pass from actuality to mere possibility; it remains actual, though no longer temporally present. Or so it would seem if we are realists about the past. The historian studies past actualities, not past possibilities.

Compare Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen to his marriage to her. There is a loose sense in which both events belong to the past. It is clear that he was engaged to Olsen. We also know that he did not marry her. But he might have. This possible event belongs to the past in the sense that, had it been actual, it would have belonged to the actual past. The crucial difference is that the first event actually occurred while the second was a mere possibility. This is a difference that an adequate philosophy of time must be able to accommodate.

To make a slogan out of it: the past is fact, not fiction; actuality not possibility.

One point to keep in mind is that if the past is wholly determinate, as determinate as the present, this is the case whether or not determinism is true. The determinate is not to be confused with the determined. (Bourne 2006, 50 f.)

Consider the proposition that my grandfather Alfonso drank a glass of dago red on New Year's Day, 1940. Bivalence ensures that the proposition is either true or false but not both. If the proposition is true and the event occurred, it doesn't matter whether the event was caused by prior events under the aegis of the laws of nature, or not. To say that the past is determinate is not to say that past events are determined; it is to say that, e.g., the past individual Alfonso V. cannot be such that he neither drank nor did not drink red wine on the date in question. It had to be one or the other if bivalence holds for the past.

Of course, no one now remembers whether or not this event occurred, and there is no written record or other evidence of the event's having occurred. If the event occurred, nothing in the present points back to it as to its cause. Some past events, states, individuals, and property-instantiations leave causal traces in the present, but not all do. My grandfather's gravestone and the dessicated bones lying beneath it are causal traces in the present of a long-dead and wholly past individual. But there is nothing in the present that bears upon the truth of the proposition that Big Al drank a glass of vino rosso on New Year's Day, 1940, assuming it is true. If true, it is true now but lacks a present truth-maker.

So it looks as if our presentist is in a serious bind. The following cannot all be true:

1) Presentism is true: whatever exists at all, exists at present.

2) The past is real.

3) The past is determinate.

4) There are countless events that really happened that no one remembers and for which there is not a shred of evidence in the present.

It seems to me that the obvious solution to this aporetic tetrad is to deny (1).

Comments enabled, but no comment will be allowed to appear that does not address the above argument.

World + God = God? The Aporetics of the God-World ‘Relation’ (2020 Version)

This from a reader:

I just started reading Philosophy for Understanding Theology by Diogenes Allen. The first chapter is devoted to the doctrine of creation. These two sentences jumped out at me: "The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone." Do you agree? How would you unpack them?

These are hard sayings indeed. Herewith, some rough notes on the aporetics of the situation.

I once cataloged twelve different meanings of 'world.' By 'world' here is meant the totality of creatures, the totality of beings brought into existence by God from nothing. (Don't confuse this sense of 'world' with the sense of 'world' as the term is used in the 'possible worlds' semantics of modal discourse.) Now if God is a being among beings, it would make no sense at all to say that "The world plus God is not more than God alone." For if we could add the uncreated being (God) to the created beings, then we would have more beings. We would have a totality T that is larger than T minus God. If God is a being among beings, then there is a totality of beings that all exist in the same way and in the same sense, and this totality includes both God and creatures such that subtracting God or subtracting creatures would affect the 'cardinality' of this totality. (Not wanting to fall afoul of Georg Cantor, I assume that the number of (concrete) creatures is finite.)

But if God is not a being among beings, but Being itself in its absolute fullness, as per the metaphysics of Exodus 3:14 (Ego sum qui sum, "I am who am") then there is no totality of beings all existing in the same way having both God and creatures as members. When we speak of God and creatures,

. . . we are dealing with two orders of being not to be added together or subtracted; they are, in all rigour, incommensurable, and that is also why they are compossible. God added nothing to Himself by the creation of the world, nor would anything be taken away from Him by its annihilation — events which would be of capital importance for the created things concerned, but null for Being Who would be in no wise concerned qua being. (Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Scribners, 1936, p. 96. Gilson's Gifford lectures, 1931-1932.)

Here, I am afraid, I will end up supplying some 'ammo' to my Protestant friends Dale Tuggy, Alan Rhoda, and James Anderson. For the Gilson passage teeters on the brink of incoherence. We are told that there are two orders of being but that they are incommensurable. This can't be right, at least not without qualification. If there are two orders of being, then they are commensurable in respect of being. There has to be some sense in which God and Socrates both are. Otherwise, God and creatures are totally disconnected, with the consequence that creatures fall away into nothingness. For if God is Being itself, and there is no common measure, no commensurability whatsoever, between God and creatures, then creatures are nothing. God is all in all. God alone is.

Gilson is well aware of the dialectical pressure in this monistic direction: "As soon as we identify God with Being it becomes clear that there is a sense in which God alone is." (65) If we emphasize the plenitude and transcendence of God, then this sensible world of matter and change is "banished at one stroke into the penumbra of mere appearance, relegated to the inferior status of a quasi-unreality." (64) That's exactly right. (I will add in passing that this metaphysical conclusion underwrites the contemptus mundi of the old-time monk and his world flight.) But of course Christian metaphysics is not a strict monism; so a way must be found to assign the proper degree of reality to the plural world.

Here is the problem in a nutshell. God cannot be a being among beings. "But if God is Being, how can there be anything other than Himself?" (84) We need to find a way to avoid both radical ontological pluralism and radical ontological monism.

It's a variation on the old problem of the One and the Many. (It is important in these discussions to observe the distinction between Being and beings, between esse and ens, between das Sein und das Seiende. Hence my use of the majuscule when I refer to the former and the miniscule when I refer to the latter.)

A. If Being itself alone is, then beings are not. But then the One lacks the many. Not good: the manifold is evident to the senses and to the intellect. The plural world cannot be gainsaid. In theological terms: If God alone is, then creatures are not, even in those possible worlds in which God creates. But then what is the difference between possible worlds in which God creates and those in which he does not?

B. If beings alone are, then Being is not. But then the many lacks the One. Not good: the many is the many of the One. A sheer manifold with no real unity would not a cosmos make. The world is one, really one. It is One in itself, not merely by our conceptualization.

C. If Being and beings both are in the same way and and the same sense, then either Being is itself just another being among beings and we are back with radical pluralism, or Being alone is and we are back with radical monism.

Gilson's Thomist solution invokes the notions of participation and analogy. God is Being itself in its purity and plenitude and infinity. Creatures exist by participation in the divine Being: they are limited participators in unlimited Being. So both God and creatures exist, but in different ways. God exists simply and 'unparticipatedly.' Creatures exist by participation. These are radically different modes of existence. God and creatures do not form a totality in which each member exists in the same way. We can thus avoid each of (A), (B), and (C).

But the notion of participation is a difficult one as Gilson realizes. It appears "repugnant to logical thought" (96): ". . . every participation supposes that the participator both is, and is not, that in which it participates." (96) How so?

I exist, but contingently. That is: I exist, but at every moment of my existence it is possible that I not exist. There is no necessity that I exist at any moment of my existence. I am not the source or ground of my own existence. No existential boot-strapping! Assuming that I cannot exist as a matter of brute fact, my Being (existence) is not my own, but received from another, from God, who is Being itself. So my Being, as wholly received from another, is God's Being. But I am not God or anything else. I have my own Being that distinguishes me numerically from everything else. So I am and I am not that in which I participate.

To formulate the contradiction in a somewhat clearer form: My existence is MY existence, and as such 'incommunicable' to any other existing item AND my existence is NOT MY existence in that it is wholly derivative from Gods existence.

In terms of the One and the Many: Each member of the Many is itself and no other thing; its unity is its own and 'incommunicable' to any other thing, AND each member of the Many derives its ownmost unity and ipseity from the One without which it would be nothing at all, lacking as it would unity.

In terms of creation: Socrates is not a character in a divine fiction; he does not exist as a merely intentional object of the divine mind; his mode of Being is esse reale, not esse intentionale, AND Socrates receives from his creator absolutely everything: his existence, essence, and properties as well as his free and inviolable ipseity and haecceity that make him an other mind, a Thou to the divine I, and a possible rebel against divine authority. So Socrates both is and is not a merely intentional object of the divine mind.

Gilson does not show a convincing way around these sorts of contradiction.

The One of the many is not one of the many: as the source of the many, the One cannot be just one more member of the many. Nor can the One of the many be the same as the many: it cannot divide without remainder into the many. The One is transcendent of the many. But while transcendent, it cannot be wholly other than the many. For, as Plotinus says, "It is by the One that all beings are beings." The One, as the principle by which each member of the many exists, cannot be something indifferent to the many or external to the many, or other than the many, or merely related to the many. The One is immanent to the many. The One is immanent to the many without being the same as the many. The One is neither the same as the many nor other than the many. The One is both transcendent of the many and immanent in the many. Theologically, God is said to be both transcendent and omnipresent. He is both transcendent and immanent.

What should we conclude from these affronts to the discursive intellect? That there is just nothing to talk about here, or that there is but it is beyond the grasp of our paltry intellects? If what I have written above is logical nonsense, yet it seems to be important, well-motivated, rigorously articulated nonsense.

The Euthyphro Dilemma, Divine Simplicity, and Modal Collapse

The Question

God commands all and only the morally obligatory. But does he command it because it is obligatory, or is it obligatory because he commands it? The question naturally arises, but issues in a dilemma. A dilemma is a very specific sort of problem in which there are exactly two alternatives, neither of which is acceptable. Thus we speak of the 'horns' of a dilemma, and of being 'impaled' on its horns.

Bear in mind the following tripartite distinction. For any agent that issues a command, there is (i) the commanding, (ii) that which is commanded (the content of the act of commanding), and (iii) the relevant normative property of the content. Contents of commands can be either permissible, impermissible, or obligatory. Note the ambiguity of 'command' as between the act of commanding, and the content commanded. And note that while finite agents sometimes command what is morally impermissible, this is never the case with God. Everything God commands is morally obligatory. The question is whether the divine commanding makes the action obligatory, or whether it is obligatory independently of God's command. In the latter case, God is at most the advocate and enforcer of an obligation but not its legislator.

Horn One

If God commands an action because it is obligatory, then the obligatoriness of the action is not due to God's command, but is logically antecedent to it. God is then subject to an independently existing system of norms that are not in his control. He is then an advocate of the moral order and its enforcer, but not its source, with negative consequences for the divine sovereignty. God is the Absolute, and the Absolute cannot be dependent on anything external to it for its existence, nature, modal status, or anything else, including the justification of its commands. The sovereign God is the absolute lord of all orders, including the moral order.

Horn Two

If an action is obligatory because God commands it, then the normative quality of the action — its being obligatory — derives from a fact, the fact of God's commanding the action. This is puzzling: how can the mere fact that an agent issues a command make the content of the command objectively binding? Of course, God is not any old agent: he is morally perfect. So you can be sure that he won't command anything that is not categorically obligatory. Still, the move from fact to norm is puzzling. The puzzle is heightened if the agent is free in the 'could have done otherwise' sense. If God is free in this sense, libertarianly free, then he might not have commanded the action, in which case it would not have been obligatory. This is an unacceptable result. If it is impermissible to kill babies for sexual gratification, and obligatory to refrain from such an action, normative properties cannot derive from any being's free will. For that would make morality arbitrary. The normative proposition It is impermissible to kill babies for sexual gratification, if true, is necessarily true. Its truth value cannot then depend on a contingent command even if the one who commands is God.

Constraints on a Solution

We are assuming that God exists, that morality is objective and not up to the whim of any being, and that God is sovereign over the moral order, and indeed, absolute lord of all orders. So we cannot solve the dilemma by denying that God exists, or by grasping one or the other of the horns, or by limiting divine sovereignty. We must find a way between the horns. If we succeed, we will have shown that the dilemma is a false alternative.

The problem has two sides. First, how do we get from a fact to a norm? To be precise, how do get from the facticity of a commanding to the normativity of the content commanded? Second, how do we ensure that the norm is absolute? We would have a solution if it could be shown that the fact just is the norm, and the fact could not have been different.

William Mann's Solution via Divine Simplicity

Mann's solution is built on the notion that, with respect to necessary truths and absolute values, God is not free to will otherwise than he wills. In this way the second horn, and arbitrarity, is avoided. But how can God be sovereign over the moral order if he cannot will otherwise than he wills? If I understand the solution, it is that sovereignty is maintained and the first horn is avoided if the constraint on divine freedom is internal to God as it would be if “absolute values are the expression of that [God's] rational autonomy.” (William E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality, Oxford UP, 2015,168) Thus God is not free as possessing the liberty of indifference with respect to necessary truths and absolute values, but he is nonetheless free as the rationally autonomous creative source of necessary truths and absolute values. God then is the source of necessary truths and absolute values, not their admirer or advocate. God is not subject to the moral order; he is the source of it. Indeed, he is identical to it. Does Mann's solution require the doctrine of divine simplicity? It would seem so. This doctrine implies that knowing and willing are identical in God. If so, then the truth value and modal status of necessary truths, including necessary moral truths, cannot be otherwise in which case God cannot will them to be otherwise.

On the doctrine of divine simplicity, then, the Euthyphro Dilemma turns out to be false dilemma: the simplicity doctrine allows for a third possibility, a way between the horns.* God is Goodness itself, not a good being among others. As such, he just is the content of morality. The moral order is not external to him nor antecedent to him logically or ontologically: he is not subject to it. Sovereignty is preserved. Arbitrarity is avoided because God cannot will any moral contents other than the ones he wills.

Problem Solved?

If God is absolutely sovereign, as he must be to be God, then he is sovereign over every order including the MODAL order. It is cogently arguable, however, that the simplicity doctrine entails the collapse of modal distinctions and thus the collapse of the modal order.

It looks as if we can solve the Euthyphro problem, but only by generating a different problem. The Euthyphro problem is solved by saying that (i) the obligatory is obligatory because God commands it, but (ii) the contents of the divine commands could not have been otherwise. They could not have been otherwise because these contents are contained within the unchangeable divine nature. Hence God is neither subject to an external moral order, nor the arbitrary creator of it. God is the moral order. In God, the facticity of the commanding and the normativity of the contents commanded are one.

But if God, because he is absolutely sovereign, cannot be subject to a logically prior MORAL order, then he also cannot be subject to a logically prior MODAL order. As absolutely sovereign, God must be sovereign over all orders. It cannot be that the possible and the necessary subsist in sublime independence of God. It cannot be that creation is the selective actualization of some proper subset of self-subsisting mere possibles, or the actualization of one among an infinity of possible worlds. Creation is not actualization. For then God would not be creating out of nothing, but out of possibles the Being of which would be independent of God's Being.

God, then, cannot be subject to a modal order independent of him. So one might think to import into God the modal distinctions, for example, the distinction between the merely possible and the actual. This importation would parallel the importation into the divine nature of the various contents of divine commands. Perhaps it is like this. God entertains mere possibles which, as merely possible, subsist only as accusatives of his thinking, but actualizes some of them, super-adding existence to them. The mere possibles that need an act of divine actualization in order to exist would then contingently exist, which is of course the result we want. Unfortunately, the contingency of actual creatures (Socrates, for example, as opposed to his merely possible brother Schmocrates) entails the possibility of no creatures and of other creatures who remain merely possible. But then we have in God a distinction between his actual and his merely possible creative decisions. This conflicts with DDS and its commitment to God's being purely actual (actus purus).

Conclusion

The doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) allows for a solution of the Euthyphro dilemma with the following advantages: it upholds the existence of God, the objectivity of morality, the non-arbitrarity of the divine will, and God's sovereignty over the moral order. But God, to be God, must be the absolute lord of all orders, including the modal order. The simplicity doctrine, however, needed to solve the Euthyphro dilemma entails the collapse of the modal order in which case it is not there to for God to be sovereign over. The objectivity of the modal distinctions needs to be upheld just as much as the objectivity of morality. But this is impossible if DDS is true. So while God must be simple to be God, he cannot be simple if if he is the creator of our universe, a universe whose contingency is the point of departure for the ascent to the divine absolute.

Welcome to the aporetics of the Absolute!

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* A dilemma is said to be false if there is a third possibility, and thus a way between the horns. The contemporary Thomist, Edward Feser, maintains that the Euthyphro dilemma is false:

Divine simplicity also entails, of course, that God’s will just is God’s goodness which just is His immutable and necessary existence. That means that what is objectively good and what God wills for us as morally obligatory are really the same thing considered under different descriptions, and that neither could have been other than they are. There can be no question then, either of God’s having arbitrarily commanded something different for us (torturing babies for fun, or whatever) or of there being a standard of goodness apart from Him. Again, the Euthyphro dilemma is a false one; the third option that it fails to consider is that what is morally obligatory is what God commands in accordance with a non-arbitrary and unchanging standard of goodness that is not independent of Him.

Schlick’s Scientism: An Antilogism

Remember Moritz Schlick? He wrote, "All real problems are scientific questions; there are no others." ("The Future of Philosophy" in The Linguistic Turn, ed. R. Rorty). The Schlickian dictum sires an antilogism.

1) All real problems are scientific.

2) The problem whether all real problems are scientific is real.

3) The problem whether all real problems are scientific is not scientific.

Each of these propositions is plausible, but they are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Which member of the trio should we reject?

I reject (1). There are real (genuine) problems that are not scientific in the way that the natural sciences are scientific. Scientific problems are amenable in principle to solution by empirical observation and experiment. This is not so for (1). So I must disagree with Schlick the positivist.

Related: The Death of Moritz Schlick

Exercise for the reader: Is the meaning of the proposition below the method of its verification? If yes, then what method might that be?

Pain and Time: An Aporetic Triad

Here are three extremely plausible propositions that cannot all be true:

1) A wholly past (felt) pain is not nothing: it is real.

2) For (felt) pains, esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived.

3) Wholly past (felt) pains are not perceived.

Ad (1): To say that an item is wholly past is to say that it does not overlap the present. A felt or phenomenal pain is a pain exactly as it is experienced from the first-person point of view of the one who endures it, with all and only the properties it appears to have from the point of view of the one who endures it. It is not to be confused with the physical cause of the pain if there is one. Now yesterday's excruciating migraine headache, which is wholly past, is not nothing: it happened. It is now an object of veridical memory. Since the memory is veridical, its intentional object cannot be unreal. The pain is also a subject of presently true past-tensed statements such as 'The pain was awful.' Given that veritas sequitur esse, that no true statement is about what is wholly unreal or nonexistent, yesterday's migraine pain cannot be unreal or nonexistent. The remembered wholly past pain is actual not merely possible; factual not fictional; real not imaginary. Of course, it is not temporally present. But it is real nonetheless. It is or exists. It is included in the ontological inventory. To deny this is to deny the reality of the past.

Ad (2): The being or existence of a felt pain is just its being-perceived. A felt pain cannot exist apart from its being experienced. Again, it is not to be confused with an external, objective, physical cause of the pain sensation, if there is one. Esse est percipi is not true of the physical cause of the felt pain. But surely it is true of the pain precisely as it is endured from the first-person perspective of the one who endures it.

Ad (3): Yesterday's particular pains are over, and thank goodness: they are not being perceived or felt or experienced by anyone.

Each of these propositions is extremely plausible if not self-evident. Each is, or is very close to being, a Moorean fact, a datum, a given, something not reasonably denied. I myself am inclined to say that each of the limbs of the triad is true. But of course they cannot all be true on pain of logical contradiction. Any two limbs of the triad entail the negation of the remaining limb. For example, The conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3). What we have here, then, is a paradigmatic philosophical problem: apparent data in logical conflict.

To avoid a logical contradiction, we must reject or revise one or more of the propositions in a principled way, i.e., by endorsing a theory that excludes the proposition. Here are four solution strategies:

A. Deny (1) by Adopting Presentism. This is the view that all and only what exists now, exists. This is not the tautology that all and only what exists now exists now, or exists in the present-tensed sense of 'exists.' It is a substantive (non-tautological) and highly controversial metaphysical thesis that restricts the ontological inventory to temporally present items. To avoid tautology, we can formulate it like this: all and only the temporally present exists simpliciter. (What exactly 'simpliciter' means here is of course part of the problem. Tenseless existence is presumably the best candidate for existence simpliciter.) Presentism entails that wholly past and wholly future items do not exist, are not real. So yesterday's pain does not exist simpliciter, and (1) is false. Problem solved. The past pain, being wholly past, is nothing at all. It is not just that it is now nothing at all — which is a mere tautology given the standard meanings of 'past,' 'present,' and 'now' — but that it is nothing at all, period!

But of course the problem is solved only if presentism makes sense and is true. And that is a big 'if.'

B. Deny (1) by Rejecting Veritas Sequitur Esse. 'JFK was assassinated' is past-tensed but presently true. It is true now that he was assassinated. But there are no truths about what does not exist. So I reason: since 'JFK was assassinated' is true, and is about JFK, he must (tenselessly) exist: wholly past items exist (are real, have being) despite being temporally non-present. You might resist my conclusion by making a Meinongian move: there are truths about beingless items and one can refer to such items. Even though JFK has ceased to exist, he is still in some sense available to serve as an object of reference and a subject of true statements.

C. Deny (2) by Adopting Materialism about the Mental. A token-token identity theorist will say that a particular pain episode is just a brain state. Now such a state, being wholly objective, can exist without being felt by anyone, in which case (2) is false. The eliminative materialist proposes a more radical solution: there are no mental states at all. Therefore, there are no felt pains and (2) is false.

D. Deny (3) by Adopting 'Eternalism.' This is a position in the philosophy of time entailed by the B-theory of time. The B-theorist denies that the present moment enjoys any temporal or existential privilege. All times and their occupants are both temporally and existentially equal. Every time is temporally present to itself such that no time is temporally present simpliciter. This temporal egalitarianism entails a decoupling of existence and temporal presentness. There just is no irreducible monadic mind-independent property of temporal presentness; hence existence cannot be identified with it. To exist is to exist tenselessly. The B-theory excludes presentism according to which there is a genuine, irreducible, property of temporal presentness and existence is either identical or logically equivalent to this property. Presentism implies that only the temporally present is real or existent. If to exist is to exist now, then the past and future do not exist, not just now (which is trivial) but at all. The B-theory leads to what is known in the trade as 'eternalism' according to which the catalog of what exists is not exhausted by present items, but includes past and future ones as well. See here for more.

If eternalism is true, then (3) above is false. The third limb of our antilogism states that past felt pains are not perceived. But if not perceived, then they do not exist. But on eternalism they do exist, tenselessly, whence it follows that yesterday's headache is tenselessly being perceived, whatever that might mean.

In a thorough discussion, I would then proceed to argue that each of these four attempts at a solution requires theories that are as problematic as the original problems. Once that case is made, a case will have been made that the above problem is an aporia in a strict sense, a problem that is fully intelligible and genuine, but insoluble by us.

Addendum (11/18)

Jonathan Barber writes,

I think you could distinguish between (a) the quale of pain (the raw sense data) and (b) the experience of pain – the mental effect produced by the raw sense data. Past qualia are not real – they simply do not exist. Past experiences are real. So in proposition 1 of your aporetic triad you are using 'pain' in sense (b), whereas in propositions 2 and 3 you are using 'pain' in sense (a).

Response. Barber's criticism, in terms I find more congenial, would go like this. There is a difference between a pain experience and its content, where the latter is the sensory quale. Past qualia are not real. Past experiences are real. 'Felt pain' in (1) refers to the experience whereas in 'felt pain' in (2) and (3) refer to the quale. I would say in response that while one can distinguish in thought between experience and quale, neither can exist in reality without the other. So if the past pain experience exists, then so does its qualitative content.

Democratic Socialism?

The label smacks of an oxymoron. Essential to socialism is collective ownership of the means of production. Democratic socialists will presumably want to distinguish socialism from statism, which may be defined as state control of the economy, where the state control is not in turn democratically controlled. Historically, however, the tendency is for supposedly collective, democratic control to transmogrify into control by an elite group of central planners who, exulting in their power, will use all the means at their disposal to hold on to it and expand it — and 'the people' be damned.

The tendency, then, is for socialism to terminate in statism and totalitarianism. Power to the people? Hardly. 'The people' end up among the socially planned and not among the social planners. Either that or they end up in a gulag.

Addendum 8/31. London Ed comments:

Good post, and the seed of an answer to the ‘No true Marxist’ argument. As you say, collective ownership of the means of production is essential to socialism, not just a mere accident.

The next step in the proof would be to show that it is essential, not just accidental, to collective ownership that supposedly collective, democratic control will inevitably transmogrify into ‘control by an elite group of central planners who, exulting in their power, will use all the means at their disposal to hold on to it and expand it’. Hence, the bad history of Marxism is not a mere accident, despite what its supporters claim.

This would be the next step in the proof if a proof in the strict sense could be had. Here socialists enjoy some 'wiggle room.' A strict proof is not available. My first point above is non-negotiable since it is merely a consequence of the definition of 'socialism.' But how do we prove that collective ownership necessarily and inevitably issues in statism and totalitarianism? Of course, repeated failure is a good inductive argument for an ideal's being unrealizable. But induction is not demonstration. Without a demonstration, we cannot deny the socialist his 'wiggle room.'

The Chesterton Move

The true-believing socialist will most likely make what I will call the 'Chesterton move.' G. K. C. famously asserted, or at least implied, that Christianity hasn't failed; it's never been tried. "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried. (G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (1910), ch. 1.5)

The idea here is that Christianity is a realizable ideal, but that we simply haven't realized it. Now if an ideal is realizable, then its never having been realized is no apodictic proof of its not being a genuine ideal, one that we ought to try to realize. Our democratic socialist can say something similar. Insufficient attempts have been made properly to implement the socialist ideal; the fact that it has never been achieved is no knock-down argument against the ideal. We have to organize and make a concerted effort and suppress the evil capitalist greed-heads who stand in our way.

The Chesterton Move and the 'No True Marxist' Fallacy

Now if our democratic socialist has available to him the Chesterton Move, then he is in a position to deny that 'No True Marxist' is a fallacy. He can say that true Marxism, or rather true socialism, will not lead to totalitarian tyranny. If it does, then it was not true socialism!

A Deeper Issue

Can we know from experience the natures of things and thus what is possible and impossible? Can we know a posteriori that socialism without totalitarian tyranny is impossible?

The conservative will presumably answer this question in the affirmative, but he won't be able to prove that he is right. Or so say I.

The Aporetics of the Situation

1) An ideal that has never been realized, despite repeated attempts to realize it, cannot be realized.

2) An ideal that cannot be realized is no (genuine) ideal at all

3) Democratic socialism is a genuine ideal.

The above is known in the trade as an antilogism or an inconsistent triad. The limbs of the triad are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent.

If you are not willing to accept that the triad is a genuine aporia or insolubilium, then you must reject/modify one of the constituent propositions. I don't believe that (2), an analog of the 'Ought implies Can' principle, can be reasonably rejected. So we either reject (1) or (3). I reject (3). The democratic socialist would have to reject (1).

Can I refute him? No. Can he refute me? No. And yet we must act. So I battle socialism and stand with Donald Trump:

America will never be a socialist country!

Watch the video and check out the expression on Bernie Sanders' face. And how about the tribal females all in white?