Category: Time and Change

Do Past-Tensed Truths Need Truthmakers?

Cyrus wrote in an earlier thread,

In the linked article, you write:

That (some) truths refer us to the world as to that which makes them true is so obvious and commonsensical and indeed 'Australian' that one ought to hesitate to reject the idea because of the undeniable puzzles that it engenders. Motion is puzzling too but presumably not to be denied on the ground of its being puzzling.

But I question whether the scope of the “some” (that is, the scope of the obviousness and commonsensicality) extends to past tensed truths. I don't find it obvious that past tensed truths have truthmakers. Presumably presentists who reject it also don't find it obvious. (Some find it obvious that the past doesn't exist.) I guess what I'm asking is: Is there an objective way to measure obviousness? If there isn't, how much should we really be relying on it in our arguments?

That's a good comment and a good challenge. As Hilary Putnam once said, "It ain't obvious what's obvious."  So I don't think there is any objective way to measure obviousness, or, to use a better term, objective self-evidence. Nevertheless, I will die in the ditch for the first of my italicized sentences above. Surely there is at least one truth that cannot just be true, but needs a truth-ground that exists and indeed exists extramentally and extralinguistically. For example, 'BV is seated.'  That cannot just be true. It cannot be a brute truth. I have gone over this so many times I'm sick of it.  So let's move on.

Cyrus supra is not questioning whether there are truthmakers, nor is he raising the question as to the nature of truthmakers, i.e., the question of the category of entity to which they belong (Armstrongian states of affairs? tropes? etc.); he is raising the question whether past-tensed truths need truthmakers. I grant that the answer is not obvious.

One thing we should be clear about is that presentists needn't deny that past-tensed truths need or have truthmakers.  For they could hold, as some have held, that these truthmakers exist at present.  On presentism, whatever exists in time exists at the present time.  This is not the tautology that whatever exists (present tense) exists (present tense). This trivial truth is contested by no one. What the presentist is maintaining is that only what exists (present tense) exists tenselessly.  Presentism about what exists  in time is a restrictionist thesis: it restricts what tenselessly exists in time to what presently exists, i.e. what exists at present, or now.  (Note the ambiguity of 'presently' in ordinary English: if I say that I will visit you presently, that means in ordinary contexts that I will visit you soon, but not now.)

So we can divide presentists who accept truthmakers in general into two groups. Group One is composed of those who hold both that some past-tensed and some present-tensed truths have truthmakers, and Group Two is composed of those who accept that there are past-tensed truths but hold that they are all brute truths.

This is the view that I will try to argue against.  But first we need to lay another assumption on the table

I assume that there are past-tensed truths. For example, I assume that it is true, and indeed true now, that JFK was assassinated and that Socrates taught Plato.  (But don't get hung up on these examples: I could use different ones.) One might deny these (datanic) points in two ways. One could assert that all past-tensed truth-bearers are false. Or one could assert that no past-tensed truth-bearer is either true or false. For now we set these (lunatic) views aside.

The assumption, then, is that there are past-tensed truths.  The question is whether any of them need truthmakers given that present-tensed truths need truthmakers.

It is contingently true that I am alive. This is not a brute truth. Its truth requires, at a minimum, the existence of the living animal that wears my clothes. It is also true that after I am dead it will be true that I was alive today. If the first truth is not brute, how could the second truth be brute? The first truth is about me. It says that BV is alive. The second truth is also about me. It says that it will be the case that BV was alive. Now a proposition cannot be about a thing unless the thing exists. So in both cases the thing, me, exists. So both truths are grounded by my existence. If <I  am alive> asserted by me today has an ontological ground, and it clearly does, then <BV was alive> asserted after I am dead by a descendant also has an ontological ground. The two propositions differ merely in tense. Does that difference make a difference with respect to truth-making? It is not clear that it does. It is plausible to hold, with T. Merricks, that if presentism is true, then all truths about wholly past items are brute truths. Should we affirm the antecedent and infer the consequent by modus ponens? Or should we deny the consequent and deny the antecedent by modus tollens? It is not clear. The arguments appear to be equally good and cancel out. This is so given that the truth-makers of past-tensed truths about wholly past items cannot be located in the present. Perhaps some can be so located, but not all.

My interim conclusion is that presentism  is open to serious objection.  The fact that 'eternalism' is also is no good reason to accept presentism.

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.

Presentism and Regret

I have done things I regret having done.  Regret is a past-directed emotion by its very nature. One cannot regret present or future actions or omissions.  So if I regret action A, A is wholly past.  What's more, I cannot regret a non-existent action.  But on presentism, all items in time are such that they exist at present.  Therefore, presentism is false.  

1) There exist states of regret.

2) Every such state has as its accusative an event that exists.

3) Every such state has as its accusative an event that is wholly past.

Therefore

4) There exist wholly past events.

5) If presentism is true, then there exist no wholly past events.

Therefore

6) Presentism is false.

Doesn't this argument blow presentism clean out of the water?  It is plainly valid in point of logical form. Which premise will you deny?

"You're begging the question! You are using 'exist(s)' tenselessly.  But on presentism, the only legitimate uses of 'exist(s)' are present-tensed."

Reply:  Please note that you too must use 'exist(s)' tenselessly to formulate your presentist thesis on pain of your thesis collapsing into the miserable tautology, 'Whatever in time exists (present-tense) exists (present-tense).'  That's fake news. To advance a substantive claim you must say, 'Whatever in time exists simpliciter exists at present' where 'simpliciter' is cashed out by 'tenselessly.'

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

Presentism and the Cross

Alexander Pruss argues:

1) It is important for Christian life that one unite one’s daily sacrifices with Christ’s sufferings on the cross.

2) Uniting one’s sufferings with something non-existent is not important for Christian life.

3) So, Christ’s sufferings on the cross are a part of reality.

4) So, presentism is false.

The Prussian argument is an enthymeme the tacit premise of which is

0) On presentism, only temporally present events exist or are real.

Add the above to your Holy Saturday meditations.

Time and the Existing Dead

Another round with David Brightly.  My responses are in blue.

Bill says,

We don't want to say that a dead man becomes nothing after death since he remains a particular, completely determinate, dead man distinct from others. If the dead become nothing after death then all the dead would be the same. If your dead father and your dead mother are both nothing, then there is nothing to distinguish them.

It's difficult to know what to make of this.  My guess is that Bill is conflating a thing with the idea of a thing. 

BV: I plead innocent. I hope David doesn't think that when a person dies, that person becomes an idea.  My veridical memories of my dead mother are memories of a woman not an idea.

First, 'particular' and 'completely determinate' do not denote properties of  concrete objects like men.  One can contrast 'I have in mind a particular man' with 'I have in mind a man' but 'particular' here qualifies not 'man' but rather the way of having in mind.  'Completely determinate' functions in a similar way.  What would 'partially determinate man' denote?  A partially determinate idea of a man makes sense, however; we know some of his properties but not others. 

BV: I beg to differ. Granted, my idea of David is incomplete: I know some of his properties but not others. But David is not the same as my idea of him, and that's a good thing for both of us. I say that David himself is complete (completely determinate), just like everything else that exists mind-independently.  It makes sense to say both that my idea of David is incomplete, and that David himself is complete.  The fact that there cannot be an incomplete man cannot be used to show that 'complete' cannot be a predicate of concrete items.  So why does David think that?

David may be relying on a Contrast Argument one form of which is as follows:

1) If a term T is meaningful, then there are items to which T does not apply.
2) There are no items to which T does not apply.
Ergo
3) T is not meaningful.

In the present case:

4) If 'complete' is a meaningful term, then there are concrete items to which 'complete' does not apply.
5) There are no concrete items to which 'complete' does not apply.
Ergo
6) 'Complete' is not a meaningful term.

Well, I reject Contrast Arguments. Bang on the link.  Similarly with 'particular.'  David appears to believe, pace Meinong, that there are no incomplete items in reality, and that all incompleteness is epistemic.  I think so too. But that is not the issue.  The issue is whether 'particular' and 'complete' can be predicated meaningfully of items like David and his dogs, or whether they qualify merely the way one has these things in mind.  He hasn't given me a good reason to change my view. 

Second, 'dead' is an alienating adjective.  If a man is a living thing and 'dead' means non-living, then a 'dead man' is a somewhat contradictory conception.  Better to think of 'is dead' as 'has died'.  A dead man is one who has passed through that final event that all living things inevitably come to, and has ceased to be. 

BV: Very tricky!  No doubt there are alienans adjectives (bang on the link), but is 'dead' (juxtaposed with 'man') one of them?  Clearly, a decoy duck is not a duck. But it is not clear that a dead duck is not a duck.  Now the corpse of a duck is not a duck.  But if your pet duck Donald dies you can still utter truths about him and have veridical memories of him. Those truths and memories are about a duck that has died, a particular duck, not a rabbit. And not about nothing. Try this triad on for size:

a) Tom Petty is a man.
b) Tom Petty is dead. (Tom Petty has died.)
c) Nothing dead is a man. (Nothing that has died is a man.)

Clearly, the singer is a man, not a duck or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy.  And clearly, Petty is dead. It seems to follow that Petty is a dead man.  So it seems we ought to reject (c) above.  Is (c) not more reasonably rejected than the other two limbs of the triad? I would say so.

Granted, Petty is not the man he used to be.  He no longer breathes, for example.  He has lost much of the typical functionality of a man. So there is rational pressure to deny (a).  There does not appear to be a clean solution to the (a)-(c) puzzle.  The propositions cannot all be true. But it is not obvious which of them to reject.

David tells us that a dead man has ceased to be. (I will assume that to be = to exist.)  But it is not at all clear that a dead man such as Tom Petty has ceased to exist.  On one way of looking at it, Petty exists just as robustly (or as anemically) as I do. We both tenselessly exist.  It is just that every moment of his existence is earlier than the present moment, whereas this is not the case for me.  Petty is wholly past whereas I exist at present, and presumably also in future.  But we both exist (tenselessly)!  This is a possible view, and distinguished thinkers have subscribed to it, Albert Einstein to mention one. So it is not obvious, pace David, that when a man or a dog or any living thing dies, it ceases to exist.  David may be assuming that only what exists (present tense), exists.  But this is a miserable tautology unless David can supply a non-presentist reading of the second occurrence of 'exists.'

Third, to speak of 'becoming nothing' on death is misleading.  Death is the end of all becoming.  One has finally begone, as it were. [?] It's not that the dead lack something to distinguish them. Rather, they are not there to be distinguished one from another.  But this is not to say that my parents were indistinguishable as objects.  Nor is it to say that my thoughts about my parents are now indistinguishable.  Surely I can say, My mother was short and my father was tall. 

BV: David can say these things, but these past-tensed truths are (i) logically contingent and (ii) true at present.  So they need truthmakers that exist at present.  What might these be if only what exists at present exists?  This, in nuce, is the grounding objection to presentism. I don't see that David has a good answer to it. If, however, existence is tenseless, then the truthmakers are easily supplied. 

DB quoting BV: Nor do we want to say that a person who dies goes from being actual to being merely possible. There is clearly a distinction between an actual past individual and a merely possible past individual.  Schopenhauer is an actual past individual; his only son Willy is a merely possible past individual

Once again I'm afraid I can't regard 'being actual' and 'being merely possible' as denoting properties of individuals. How these predications are to be understood is not an easy question.  Suffice it to say that there is clearly a problem with  'Schopenhauer's only son Willy' when the philosopher's only child was a daughter.

BV: I don't get the daughter bit.  But surely David is an actual individual, not a merely possible individual.  I have no idea why he balks at this.  He is actual, not merely possible, or necessary, or impossible.  What's more, he is contingent: although he actually exists, he is possibly such that he does not exist.  There is no necessity that he exist at any time at which he exists.  And note that if 'actual' is true of everything, it does not follow that 'actual' is not a meaningful term.

DB quoting BV: On the 'growing block' theory, dead Petty exists. (This is obviously not a present-tensed use of 'exists.') He does not exist at present, but he exists in the sense that he belongs to the actual world.  Once actual, always actual. Is this wholly clear? No, but it is tolerably clear and plausible. After all, we are making singular reference to Petty, a concrete actual individual, as we speak, and this is a good reason to hold that he exists, not at present of course, but simpliciter.

The 'growing block' theory sounds like a kind of four-dimensionalism deriving from the physicist's notion of spacetime as a four-dimensional manifold.  We trace the world-lines of the particles that were ever part of Petty and we find that they form a densely packed blob within a certain spacetime region.  We are tempted to identify the contents of this region with Petty himself.  If we think of the ensemble of worldlines of all material particles as the actual world itself, then yes, the Petty blob seems indeed to belong to the actual world.  But this is a mistake.  The worldline of a particle represents not so much the particle itself but rather its history.  Likewise the blob we take to be Petty represents his biography, in mind-numbing detail.  We are confusing a thing with the life it lived.  Of course Petty belonged to the world—I don't see quite what 'actual' adds here—it's just that he does not belong to it any more.  Perhaps Bill is emphasising that Petty was a real man, not, say, a character in a fiction like Spinal Tap.  There is more than a hint here that Bill is appealing to a theory of direct reference.  Petty has to exist in order that we may refer to him.

BV: There are several gnarly issues that need disentangling. I'll leave that for later. David tells us that Petty was actual but is not now actual.  That is true, but trivial.   It may be that what David is advocating is that we simply use tensed language and not make any trouble for ourselves by asking such as questions as: what makes it true that Petty was a musician?  It may be that he is a tautological presentist who maintains that whatever exists, exists, where 'exists' in both occurrences is present-tensed.  It may be that he is refusing to stray from ordinary English and credit such high-flying metaphysical questions as: Is the whole of reality restricted to the present moment or not?

Presentism and Truthmakers: A Reply to David Brightly

I first want to apologize to David Brightly for not paying more attention to his ongoing gentlemanly critique of my ideas at his weblog, tillyandlola: Comments on the Maverick.    Although our minds work in very different ways, this is scant excuse for my not having engaged his incisive and well-intentioned critique more fully.  I shall make amends in this Lenten season and beyond. On 28 April 2019, he posted the following:

Presentism and Truthmakers

 
Bill runs through the truthmaker objection to presentism:  truths about the past are truths now and hence need present truthmakers yet under presentism there don't seem to be any.  Let's consider a variant of Bill's example: 

S. Kennedy commanded PT109.  

That's true.  But what in the present grounds this truth? On the face of it, that's a rather weird question.  Why should we expect there to be something about the world now that grounds a truth about the past? But Bill has a point I think: we say that S is true, now.  Bill rightly dismisses Ed Feser's half-hearted attempt to reconcile presentism and truthmakerism.  So what should we say about this puzzle?

Consider this sentence:

T.  Kennedy commands PT109.

In 1943 T was true and we may suppose that in 1943 the world was in some way that made it true.  But now in 2019 that way has long since ceased to be and T is no longer true.  How then do we express the way of 1943 from the vantage point of 2019?  We can't just use T as that is false.  Instead, the rules of English, unchanging over the intervening period, tell us to use S, a modification in tense of T.  The past way, once expressed by T is now expressed by S.  S is not a brute truth.  It's a rule-governed transformation of a made truth.  

 
………………………..
 
Brightly appreciates that it won't do to say that (S) is just true.  As a contingent truth, (S) needs something external to it to explain its being true.  It needs a truthmaker. David also appreciates that, while the past-tensed (S) is true at present, on presentism  nothing that exists at present  could serve as the truthmaker of (S). Brightly's theory seems to be that because the past-tensed (S) is a rule-governed transformation of the present-tensed (T), and because (T) was a "made truth," i.e, was a truth having a truthmaker, (S) has a truthmaker too, namely the truthmaker of  (T).
 
But note that (T) WAS made true in 1943 by something that existed then, but does not exist now. So it is difficult to see how the truthmaker of (T) that DID exist, but does not now exist, can serve as the truthmaker of S.  (S) is true at present, and such a truth, if it has a truthmaker, has an existent truthmaker, a truth maker that on presentism presently exists. Equivalently, although (T) WAS true in 1943, it is false now.  Being false now, it has no truthmaker now. So if the truthmaker of (S) now is the truthmaker (T) had then, then (S) has no truthmaker now.  
 
Brightly might simply be denying that past-tensed contingent truths such as (S) need truthmakers. But if present-tensed contingent truths need them — and they obviously do — then it it is difficult to see how the mere passage of time can absolve them of this need when these present-tensed truths become past-tensed truths by that "rule-governed transformation" that David spoke about.  For example, 'I am blogging' is now true, but in an hour it will be false. An hour from now 'I was blogging' will be true.  Now abstract from tense and indexicality. The result is BV blogs. The bolded expression picks out the tenseless propositional content that is common to the present-tensed 'BV is blogging' (or 'BV blogs')  and the past-tensed 'BV was blogging' (or 'BV blogged.')
 
It is the contingency of that propositional content, and its reference beyond itself, that requires that there be a truthmaker for said content.  The tense of the content is irrelevant to the requirement.  So if present-tensed truths need truthmakers, then so do past-tensed truths.  The mere passage of time cannot abrogate the requirement.
 
If so, then the truthmaker objection to presentism is up and running. For on presentism, the present alone exists. But if so, then there are no past-tensed contingent truths: there is nothing in reality to ground their truth. The upshot would appear to be a denial of the reality of the past.  

Life’s Fugacity

Tempus fugit carpe diemAs we age, the passage of time seems to accelerate.  This is a mere seeming since, if time passes at all, which itself may be a mere seeming, time presumably passes at a constant rate.  When we are young, the evanescence of our lives does not strike us.  But to us mid-streamers and late-streamers the fluxious fugacity of this life is all too apparent.

Why does time's tempo seem to speed up as the years roll on?  Part of the explanation must be that there is less change and more stasis from decade to decade.  Dramatic changes in body and mind and environment occur in the first two decades of life.  You go from being a helpless infant to a cocky youth.  Your horizon expands from the family circle to the wide world.  In the third decade, biological growth over with,  one typically finishes one's education and gets settled in a career.  But there are still plenty of changes.  From age 20 to 30, I lived in about 15 different places in California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Austria, and Germany, studied at half a dozen universities, and worked as a guitar player, logger, tree planter, furniture mover, factory worker, mailman, taxi driver, exterminator, grave digger, and philosophy professor.  But from 30 to 40, I lived in only five different places with exactly one job, and from 40 to 50 in three places,  and from ages 49 to the present I have had exactly one permanent address.  And it won't be long, subjectively speaking, before I have exactly one address that is permanent in the absolute as opposed to the relative sense.

Abstracta: Omnitemporal or Timeless?

Is everything in time? Or are there timeless entities? 

So-called abstracta are held by many to be timeless.  Among abstracta we find numbers, (abstract as opposed to concrete) states of affairs, mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) sets, and Fregean (as opposed to Russellian) propositions, where a Fregean proposition (Gedanke) is the sense (Sinn) of a  sentence (Satz) in the indicative mood  from which all indexical elements, including the tenses of verbs, have been removed.  The following items are neither in space, nor causally active/passive, but some say that they exist in time at every time: 7, 7's being prime, {7}, that 7 is prime.  If an item exists in time at every time, then it is omnitemporal.  If an item is 'outside' time, then it is timeless or eternal or, to be helpfully pleonastic in the manner of the late Hugh McCann, timelessly eternal.

Let us agree that a temporalist is one for whom everything is in time, while an eternalist is one for whom some things are not in time. This is a correct use of 'eternalist' as opposed to the misuse of those who use 'eternalism' to oppose presentism by maintaining that temporal items such as Socrates and his drinking of the hemlock exist tenselessly. Temporal items that exist tenselessly are precisely temporal items and not eternal items. It is perhaps for this reason that McCann's pleonasm is justified.  The tenselessly 'eternal' is in time and therefore not timelessly eternal. 

On p. 55 of his Creation and the Sovereignty of God (Indiana University Press 2012), Hugh McCann argues that the temporalist, who maintains that everything is in time, cannot formulate his thesis without presupposing that there are timeless states of affairs, at least of the negative sort.  Here is how I see the argument. 

Part of what the temporalist says is that

1. There are no timeless states of affairs.

How is 'there are no' in (1) to be understood?  The temporalist must intend it to be taken in a way consistent with temporalism, thus:

2. There never have been, are not now, and never will be any timeless states of affairs.

Unfortunately, the eternalist, who maintains that some things are not in time,  will agree with the temporalist on the truth of (2).  Consider 7's being prime.  Both agree that at no time does this state of affairs exist.  It does not exist at any time because it exists outside of time. The agreement is unfortunate because it shows that the bone of contention cannot be formulated in terms of (2).  The bone of contention must be formulated in terms of (1) taken tenselessly.  Thus

1.* It is tenselessly true that there are no timeless states of affairs.

But (1.*) entails

3. It is timelessly true that there are no timeless states of affairs.

But (3) is self-refuting. Temporalism, when properly formulated, i.e., when formulated in a way that permits disagreement between temporalist and eternalist, refutes itself by implying its own negation.

So not everything can be in time. Abstracta are timeless, not tenseless.

A Parallel with the Problem of Formulating Presentism

We have seen in previous posts that to avoid tautology the presentist, according to whom the temporally present alone exists, must reach for a tenseless sense of 'exists.'  He cannot say, tautologically, that whatever exists (present tense) exists now.  For that is not metaphysical 'news.'  It is nothing to fight over, and fight we must.  He has to say: Whatever tenselessly exists, exists now.  But then he seems to presuppose that there are times, as real as the present time, at which temporal individuals such as Socrates tenselessly exist.  The upshot is that when presentism is given a non-tautological formulation, a formulation that permits disagreement beween presentist and anti-presentist, it refutes itself.  For if there are non-present times as real as the present time, then it is not the case that only present items exist. 

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.

Do You Disappear When You Die? Comments on Yourgrau

Here, by Palle Yourgrau. Comments by BV in blue.  HT: Vlastimil Vohanka.

Many philosophers seem to think you simply 'disappear' when you die, 'erased' from the framework of reality as one would rub out a drawing on the blackboard. I think it would be a serious mistake to think this way. Time maga­zine had it right when it represented the death of bin Laden, hence his 'nonexistence,' with a picture of him on the cover, crossed out with a big X. If you’re lecturing on the capture and killing of bin Laden, you might draw a picture of him on the blackboard, and then conclude your lecture by drawing, as Time did, a big X across that drawing. That would be the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do would be to simply erase the drawing, to rub it out. A blank blackboard does not represent the death of bin Laden. On the contrary, it represents nothing. Bin Laden, on dying, did not become nothing, just as he did not come from nothing. (Ex nihilo, nihil fit.)

Let us assume that a (human) person is just an animated human body and that there is no Platonic soul or Cartesian res cogitans or anything relevantly similar of an immaterial nature that continues to exist after bodily death.  Let us assume that at death all of a person's mental and spiritual functions cease. The issue is whether a person, upon dying, becomes nothing. To make the question totally clear, assume that the person's corpse has been fully cremated. Is a person after death and cremation nothing at all? I am with Yourgrau part of the way: Bin Laden is not now nothing. One simple consideration is this: bin Laden is an object of veridical memories and the subject of many true propositions.  So he can't be nothing.  The wholly past is actual, not merely possible; factual, not fictional; real, not imaginary. Those are datanic claims, it seems to me, or very near datanic. They lay claim to being Moorean facts beyond reasonable dispute.

If presentism in the philosophy of time is the claim that all and only temporally present items exist, then presentism is false. The dead rise up to mock those who would restrict the ontological inventory to what exists at present.  At Halloween and at every season.

What about Yourgrau's claim that bin Laden did not come from nothing?  That is true if all it means is that prior to his conception there were two gametes that had to join to produce his zygotic self. In simpler terms, bin Laden did not come from nothing because he had material causes and they were not nothing. (Nor was the copulation of his parents nothing.)  But it is false if it means that, prior to bin Laden's conception, that very individual, bin Laden, was something real, and not nothing. 

The following temporal asymmetry strongly recommends itself: what no longer exists is not nothing; but what does not yet exist is nothing. It seems quite clear that we do refer successfully to wholly past individuals and events such as bin Laden and his being killed.  It is rather less clear how anyone, including God, could refer to bin Laden, that very individual qua individual, before his conception.  See A Most Remarkable Prophecy for some reasons.

But let's not worry at the moment about future individuals, if any; let's focus on past individuals, and, in particular, the human dead, about whom we all  have a lively interest.

Just this, however, seems to have escaped many, if not most philosophers who’ve written about the metaphysics of death. Shelly Kagan, for example, writes in his popular study Death that “nonexistence is nonexistence. It’s no kind of con­dition or state that I am in at all [after I’ve died]." Kagan seems to believe that when you’ve died and ceased to exist, there’s “no one left” to be in any sort of state or con­dition. There’s no one left even to be in the state of nonex­istence, to have the property of nonexistence. He seems to subscribe to W.V. Quine’s doctrine that “in our common- sense usage of ‘exist’, that [bin Laden] doesn’t exist, means simply that there is no such entity at all.” If there’s no such entity, ob­viously, there’s no such entity to occupy the state of nonexist­ence, to have the property of nonexistence.

As I said, this is a widely held view among philosophers of death. To choose another prominent example, consider what Francis Kamm writes in Morality, Mortality: “Life can sometimes be worse for a person than the alternative of nonexistence, even though nonexistence is not a better state of being.” For Kamm, nonexistence is never a better state of being than is exist­ence because for her, apparently, nonexistence is not a state of being at all.

Kamm and Kagan, however, are mistaken. What they say is true not of Socrates but of the tooth fairy. The tooth fairy is indeed not in a state of nonexistence for the simple reason that there is no such person as the tooth fairy. By con­trast, there is such a person as Socrates. Nathan Salmon, in “What Is Existence?” puts the matter succinctly: “‘Kripke exists’ is true whereas ‘Napoleon exists’ is false. Kripke has existence. Napoleon has nonexistence.”

When you die and cease to exist, you aren’t 'erased', you aren’t 'rubbed out', nor do you turn into a different kind of being. You forfeit your existence, not your essence. Death affects that you are, not what you are. Thus, assuming, for the sake of argument, that persons are concrete objects and that that is part of their essence, when Socrates died he didn’t cease being concrete. He went from being an existent concrete object to being a nonexistent concrete object. And the same is true, analogously, of an inorganic concrete ob­ject like a rock. This will no doubt sound paradoxical (not to say, downright crazy) to many people. Surely, what’s not there can’t be concrete! After all, if something’s concrete, you can trip over it in the dark, whereas there’s no need to worry about tripping over the nonexistent. True enough, if we’re speaking about an actual, an existent concrete object. But here we’re speaking of concrete objects that have ceased to exist— i.e. that have lost their existence, but not their es­sence. (Indeed, what would it mean for something to lose its essence? What would make it that very thing that had lost it?

The moral, then, is this: Concreteness should not be con­fused with actuality.

What Yourgrau is proposing is a Meinongian or quasi-Meinongian theory of wholly past individuals such as Socrates.  Socrates, unlike the Tooth Fairy, is real, not imaginary or fictional or mythical. But Socrates does not exist.  His present nonexistence, though, does not entail his being nothing at all. He is something: a nonexistent essence. Yourgrau, by contrast is an existent essence. But Yourgrau too will die, and when he does, he will become a nonexistent essence and join the company of Socrates and all the other concrete nonexistent individual essences.  To get a sense of what is meant by 'individual essence' here, consider any concrete thing that exists such as the table in front of you and 'peel away' (in thought) its existence.  'Peel away' the thing's Dasein.  What's left over is the thing's quiddity or whatness or Sosein or individual essence.  But don't confuse this individual essence with an abstract property such as a Plantingian haecceity. It is not a property of the thing, but the thing itself 'minus' its existence. And it is not abstract, but concrete.  The distinction between (individual) essence and existence, while made by the mind, has a foundation in things, a basis in reality.  We are in the vicinity of the distinctio realis of the Thomists.  But as I read Yourgrau, he is pushing further in a Meinongian direction.  If I understand Thomas, an essence cannot be without existence; what Yourgrau is envisaging, however, are individual essences that are without existence. This is tantamount to Meinong's Independence of Sosein from Sein.

So you've got your existent essences and your nonexistent essences.  When you die, you don't disappear or cease to be; you remain as a nonexistent essence.  You don't remain in existence as a nonexistent essence; that would be contradictory. So what Yourgrau might be saying is that you remain in being as a nonexistent essence.  Accordingly, essences ARE but only some of them EXIST. Indications are that Yourgrau holds that existent essences are all and only the temporally present ones. That would make him a kind of presentist.  He would avoid my anti-presentist objection above by saying that, while the dead do not exist, they are.  Or he could go full Meinongian and say that a dead person is an essence or Sosein that has no Sein whatsoever.  This is Meinong's famous doctrine of Aussersein according to which nonexistent objects are jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein. Accordingly, when I remember my dead mother and say things about her, she is the beingless object of my veridical memories and the beingless subject of my statements. 

Here is one place where I would insert the blade of critique. It is difficult to understand how there could be items that have no being whatsoever but are yet mind-independent.  My dead mother is irremovably resident in the past no matter what anyone says or thinks about her, and whether anyone thinks about her at all.Her fate, and yours too, dear reader, will be to enter oblivion, and sooner than you think. But to be forever and wholly forgotten is not to be nothing. She will forever be something. But how can anything be something if it has no being at all?

But Yourgrau needn't go all the way with Meinong. He could say that the dead, while they they do not exist, yet ARE.

A difference between me and Yourgrau is that I would say that the dead (and all wholly past items) are actual, not merely possible. Yourgrau does not say this since for him, to exist is to be actual.  But then what is the modal status of the dead? Here the critical blade comes out again. 

If, when a thing ceases to exist, it ceases to be actual, what modal status does it acquire? 'Actual' is a modal word; it is a member of the (alethic) modal family including 'possible,' 'merely possible,' 'impossible,' 'necessary,' 'contingent,' and 'noncontingent.'  So when Socrates ceased to exist,  did he become merely possible? No. Past individuals are not merely possible individuals. They actually were. 

Since Yourgrau accepts concrete individual essences, he might say the following. Before Socrates was conceived, he WAS as a merely possible individual, an essence without existence.  When he came into existence, he became actual: his essence was actualized. When he ceased to exist, he ceased to be actual and became — what? An impossible individual essence? (If nothing can have two beginnings of existence, and our man has had one, then it is impossible that he exist and be actual again.)  There are nasty questions here.  For example, how can the modal status of an item change over time?  More later. It's Saturday night. Time to punch the clock, pour myself a drink, and tune in Judge Jeannine.

This difficulty of speaking coherently of the dead is by no means confined to philosophers of death, nor, indeed, to philosophers of any stripe. It’s especially noticeable in book dedications, where authors simply cannot bring themselves to refer to the dead, themselves, substituting instead refer­ence to the memory of the dead. When you think about it, however, this is absurd. Unlike the dead, our memories of the dead are alive and well, and in any case, are a poor substitute for the loved ones being honored in the dedications. It’s your mother who taught you to love music, not your memories of your mother, your father who first took you to a poetry reading, not your memories of your father, and so on. What could be more different from a dead parent than a living memory? The nonexistence of the dead should make us more attuned to what’s real, not less. For the dead relative is every bit as real as, though less existent than, the living memory. “Never . . . think of a thing or being we love but have not actually before our eyes,” Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace, “without reflecting that perhaps this thing has been destroyed, or this person is dead. May our sense of reality not be dissolved by this thought but made more intense. . . . Love needs reality”

This is an extract from the book 'Death and Nonexistence' by Palle Yourgrau (Oxford University Press, August 2019).

Yourgrau makes some excellent and true points here.  The dead are real.  When I remember my dead mother I remember her, not my memory of her.  But his Meinongian or quasi-Meinongian theory raises some difficult questions.  

Yourgrau palle

Peter Unger on the Emptiness of the Present-Eternalist Debate

Peter Unger doubts, with respect to the past, but not with respect to the future, whether there is any “concretely substantial difference” between presentism and eternalism (Empty Ideas, Oxford UP, 2014, 176 ff.). He argues that any appearance of a substantial difference is “illusory.” Both parties agree on such contingent past-tensed truths as that dinosaurs once roamed the earth. They agree that there are such truths about the past whether we know them or not. The parties to the dispute further agree that these truths are fixed and determinate, and as such unalterable. To employ one of Unger's examples, was Abe Lincoln as a boy ever friends with a boy named 'David'? According to Unger, he either was or was not, and there is a fact of the matter one way or the other. No matter that we don't know which. Unger: “. . . our Presentist and our Eternalist will agree that 'what's past is already fixed and determined; it's a done deal which cannot possible be undone.” (2014, 177) In sum, both parties to the controversy agree that there are truths about the past; that some of them are known to be true; that these truths, whether known or not, form a complete set; and that these truths cannot be changed.

Unger's point is that presentist and eternalist differ only in the ways they talk and think about the collection of agreed-upon Moorean facts. The eternalist, but not the presentist, will say that dinosaurs tenselessly exist and tenselessly roam the earth at times millions of years earlier than the time at which the eternalist speaks, etc. The presentist, but not the eternalist, will just use ordinary English with its tenses: dinosaurs don't exist now, but they used to exist millions of years ago, and when they existed they roamed the earth, etc. There is no “concretely substantial difference” between what the presentist holds and what the eternalist holds with respect to the past. (2014, 178) Their disagreement is trivial and insubstantial because they differ merely on how to talk about a body of agreed-upon facts.

But this can't be right since, while there is much that presentists and eternalists agree on, there are substantive points of disagreements that divide them. Unger says on behalf of the presentist that “a tenseless way of talking and thinking will have us (at least tend to) 'spatialize time,' thus (tending to make or) making obscure to us the dynamic aspect of concrete reality . . . .” (2014, 177, emphasis in original). Right here Unger himself unwittingly points to a substantive disagreement that divides presentists and eternalists, or at least those (the majority) of the latter who are B-eternalists. Is there a dynamic aspect of concrete reality? Surely it is a substantive question whether concrete, mind-independent reality is static or dynamic. If real time is exhausted by the B-series, then B-eternalism advocates a static view of time and change unacceptable to presentists.

It surely seems that the following related questions are also substantive: Is temporal passage real or is it mind-dependent? Is time a fourth dimension of a four-dimensional manifold, space-time, which features time as its fourth dimension? Is the existence of temporal items independent of when they exist, or does the existence of such items depend on when they exist? Is existence reducible to temporal presentness, or not? Are the truths about the past on which presentists and eternalists agree brute truths or are they truths grounded in items external to the truths? Suppose we pursue the last question.

Presentist and eternalist agree on the contingent truth that Socrates existed but does not now exist. What is this truth about? The natural answer is that it is about Socrates. The presentist, however, for whom only the present exists, cannot avail himself of this natural answer. For if present items alone exist, then Socrates does not exist in which case he cannot be referred to: the reference relation is such that, necessarily, if a name refers to, or is about, a thing, then the thing exists. The presentist has to say, implausibly, that 'Socrates' is about something else such as Socrates' haecceity, or else that the name is not about anything, and that therefore the truth in question is a brute truth. To say that it is a brute truth is to say that it is just true! When he was alive, the present-tensed 'Socrates exists,' or rather the proposition expressed by the Greek equivalent, was about Socrates, and true in virtue of Socrates' existence, but after he ceased to exist, 'Socrates existed,' which became true on Socrates' demise, is not about him. That is surely strange.

The eternalist, recoiling in disgust, will say that the truth that Socrates existed is about Socrates who exists tenselessly at (some but not all of the) times earlier than the time of this observation, and that, therefore, the truth in question is not a brute truth, but one grounded in the (tenseless) existence of Socrates. Whatever the merits of the competing views, we certainly seem to have here a substantive disagreement, one that pivots on the question whether singular, affirmative truths about merely past items need truth-makers or truth-grounds. Maybe they do; maybe they don't. Either way, this is not a dispute about different ways of talking and thinking about some agreed-upon collection of Moorean facts.

Unger also says on behalf of the presentist that

. . . there aren't any such tenseless senses of, or forms of, 'exist' and 'be,' and any other naturally available constructions featuring verbs. . . . when it is said that two and three make five, the only real sense of that is the same as the single sense of what's stated when it's said that two and three now make five. . . . So, properly, we should say that two and three always did make five, and they now do make five, and they always will make five. (2014, 176-7.)

But here too there are points of substantive disagreement. It is a substantive question whether or not numbers are timeless entities. Suppose they are. Then the copula in '7 is prime' will have to be tenseless. Talk about the timeless is tenseless. Since it is a substantive question whether there are timeless items, it is a substantive question whether there are tenseless senses of 'exist' and 'be.' Suppose I say to my class, “David Hume is an empiricist who believes that every significant idea is traceable to a corresponding sensory impression.” It is an interesting substantive question whether the verb forms in this sentence are tenseless or tensed.

Non-Substantial Change, Trope Bundle Theory, and States of Affairs

MeinertsenI am presently writing a review article for Metaphysica about Bo R. Meinertsen's Metaphysics of States of Affairs: Truthmaking, Universals, and a Farewell to Bradley's Regress (Springer 2018). Since I will probably incorporate the following critical remarks into my review, I want to give Bo a chance to respond. 

Substantial and Non-Substantial Change

One way a thing can change is by coming into being or passing away. This is called substantial change.  We could also call it existential change. The other way could be called alterational change. This occurs when a thing, persisting for a time, alters in respect of its intrinsic properties during that time.  Consider the ripening of a tomato. This typically involves the tomato's going from green to red.  This change in respect of color is an alterational, or accidental, or non-substantial change. One and the same entity (substance) persists through a non-zero interval of time and instantiates different properties (accidents) at different times.  As I would put it, there is no alterational change without existential unchange: numerically the same tomato is green, hard, inedible, etc. at time t and red, soft, and edible at later time t*. Bo and I are both assuming that things in time persist by enduring, not by perduring. 

The Problem of Non-Substantial Change of Continuants

This is 

. . . the problem of how to ground the fact that continuants 'persist through change'. For instance, a tomato's changing from red to green [sic] is a case of non-substantial change, and how do we ground the fact that the tomato that has changed exists both before and after the change? The bundles of basic trope theory essentially have the members they actually have and are therefore incompatible with such change. (Meinertsen 2018, 49)

The problem is that we want to say that one and the same tomato goes from being green to being red. We want to be able to uphold the diachronic identity of the tomato as it alters property-wise.  But this is impossible on basic bundle-theoretic trope theory because trope bundles have their members essentially.  This means that if bundle B has trope t as a member, then it is impossible that B exist without having t as a member. The counterintuitive upshot is that a green tomato assayed as a bundle of tropes ceases to exist when it ceases to be green.  This implies that our tomato when so assayed cannot undergo alterational, or accidental, or non-substantial change when it goes from green to red, hard to soft, etc.  It implies that every change is a substantial change. I agree with Meinertsen that this is a powerful objection to the basic bundle-of-tropes assay of ordinary particulars.

Does a State of Affairs Ontology Face the Same Problem?

Meinertsen says that it does not:

State of affairs ontology has no problem in dealing with the problem of non-substantial change. None of the properties of a particular in a state of affairs — which as we shall see in Chap. 5 is a bare particular — is included in it, as opposed to instantiated by it. Hence, it changes non-substantially if and only it ceases to instantiate at least one of these properties or whenever it instantiates a new property. (49)

It seems to me, though, that states of affairs (STOA) ontology faces, if not the very same problem, then a closely related one.

Critique

It is true that a bare particular does not include its properties: the bare or thin particular stands to its properties in the asymmetrical external relation of instantiation.  So what Meinertsen is telling us is that it is the bare particular that remains numerically the same over time while some of its properties are replaced by others. This is what grounds the diachronic numerical identity of the continuant.  The substratum of change is the bare particular 'in' the tomato, not the tomato as a whole.

But this answer is less than satisfactory. What changes over time is not a thin particular, but a thick particular. It is the green tomato with all its properties that loses one or more of them and becomes a red tomato.  This is supported by the fact that we do not see or otherwise perceive the thin particular; we do, however, see and otherwise perceive thick particulars.  What we have before us is a tomato that we see to be green and feel to be  hard, etc.,  and that we then later see to be red and feel  to be soft, etc.  

Arguably, then, it is the thick particular that is the substratum of non-substantial change, not the thin particular. If so, then a problem arises similar to the problem that arose for the bundle-of-tropes theory. How?

Well, the green tomato is a STOA whose nature is N1, where N1 is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are all the intrinsic properties of the green tomato. The red tomato is a STOA whose nature is N2, where N2 is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are all the intrinsic properties of the red tomato.  These STOAs differ numerically for they differ in one or more constituents.  The first has greenness as a constituent, the second does not. A STOA is a complex, and two complexes are the same iff they have all the same constituents. 

So what's the problem? The problem is that any non-substantial change in the green tomato assayed as a STOA destroys its identity just as surely as any non-substantial change in the green tomato assayed as a bundle of tropes destroys its identity. On either account, there is no adequate explanation of non-substantial change. This is because there is no numerically self-same substratum of change that endures through the change in properties. The thin particular is not plausibly regarded as the substratum. I note en passant that Gustav Bergmann regarded bare particulars as momentary entities, not as persisting entities.

The problem set forth as an aporetic sextad:

  1. There is no change in intrinsic properties of an ordinary particular over time without a numerically self-same substratum of change. (endurantist assumption)
  2. The green tomato changes to red. (pre-theoretical datum)
  3. The green tomato that changes to red is a thick particular. (pre-theoretical datum)
  4. Thick particulars are STOAs. (theoretical claim)
  5. STOAs are complexes. (true by definition)
  6. Two complexes are the same iff they share all constituents. (theoretical claim)

These six propositions are collectively inconsistent. My question to Meinertsen: which of these propositions will you reject? Presumably, he will have to reject (3) and say that 'the green tomato' refers to an invisible thin particular, and it is this item that changes from green to red and that serves as the substratum of change.

What do I say?  For now I say merely that, pace Bo, on the issue before us, STOA ontology is no better than the bundle-of-tropes theory.

Better ‘Has Been’ than ‘Never Was’

Why, if the present alone is real? 

The wholly past no longer exists. But this truism, accepted by all who understand English and its verb tenses, is not what the presentist in the philosophy of time maintains. He intends something substantive and non-tautological: what no longer exists does not exist at all, and what does not yet exist does not exist at all.  But if the first half of the substantive thesis is true, then why is it better to be a has-been rather than a never-was? X cannot be better than y unless x is different from y.

Presentism, taken full-strength, implies that there is no difference between what has been and what never was. For the wholly past has fallen into the same hole out of which the 'never was' never arose. How then can presentism be common sense as many of its noted contemporary defenders say? It appears to conflict with the widespread commonsensical intuition that 'has been' is better than and therefore different from 'never was.' 

Sometimes, when we reflect upon our accomplishments, we append the thought, "And no one can ever take that away from me." You are no longer at the top of your game, but you once were — and no one can take that away from you. They said you couldn't do it but you did, and they can't take that away from you. 

Interestingly, not even divine omnipotence extends to the erasure of the past. What was is forever inscribed in indelible ink in the roster of being.  Aquinas admitted it: not even God can restore a virgin. 

Two points. First, what was has an ontological status superior to that which never was — which has no ontological status at all. Second, what was, though logically contingent at the time of its occurrence, is now in a sense necessary, but without ceasing to be logically contingent.  The mere passage of time works  a modal promotion, from contingency to necessitas per accidens, accidental necessity.  Socrates freely drank the hemlock, hence his drinking was logically contingent.  But once past, the deed cannot be undone by god or mortal, chance or fate. Cannot. Under the aspect of eternity, however, the heroic act remains logically contingent.

How curious the reality of the past!  On the one hand, the wholly past seems to possess a lesser degree of being than the present and is therefore inferior to the present in point of reality. On the other, the wholly past, unlike the present, is unalterable. Bad news and good news.

The main point however, is that the past is real, a realm of actualities, not mere possibilities. How that fact jibes with presentism is a nice question.  We can expect from the presentists  some fancy footwork.

Why has presentism been so 'popular' these past ten or twenty years?