I agree with the following remark in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Zettel.
456. Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called “loss of problems.” (Problemverlust) Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world become broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial. Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this.
I prefer to say that some philosophers are problem-blind. It is not as if they have lost the problems; they never found them. They are like unto the ostrich with his head in the sand.
Here is a problem, or rather a question, that seems to me genuine and ‘deep.’ It has to do with the relation of time and existence. Do only temporally present items exist, or do wholly past and wholly future items also exist? For this to be a substantive question of metaphysics, ‘exist’ in both of its occurrences in the preceding sentence cannot be in the present tense. If they were, ‘Only present items exist’ would be logically true and ‘Past and present and future items all exist’ would be logically false. For it is logically true that only present items exist at present, and logically false that past, present, and future items all exist at present, given that ‘past’ and ‘future’ mean wholly non-present.
Continue reading “Against Ostrich Presentism and Problem-Blindness”
