This entry is Part One of a multi-part attempt to understand and evaluate the late E. J. Lowe's 'untimely' version of presentism. It is 'untimely' in that he resists what he takes to be the reification of time and times, and because his presentism is very different from its contemporary competitors. I am basing my interpretation mainly on "Presentism and Relativity: No Conflict" in Ciuni, et al. eds., New Papers on the Present (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 2013, 133-152) and on "How Real is Substantial Change," The Monist, vol. 89, no. 3 (2006), 275-293. Page references in parentheses refer to the first article unless otherwise noted. All emphases are in the original.
1) Lowe insists on "The ontological primacy of present reality and the objective status of temporal passage." (133) These commitments justify calling him a presentist.
2) But he "repudiates [what he takes to be] the reification of time and 'times,' including the 'present moment' . . . ." (133) To reify is to treat as real what is not real. Lowe appears to be saying that there are no such items as times, and thus no such item as the present time. If so, one cannot quantify over times. This would seem to scotch fairly standard definitions or definition-schemata of 'presentism' along the following lines:
(P1) Always, only present items exist.
That is: every time is such that only what is non-relationally present at that time exists simpliciter.
3) The focus for Lowe is not on the present moment, but on the "fundamental reality of change . . . ." (133)
4) Change, however, is in every case "existence change — that is, the coming into or going out of existence of entities of one kind or another . . . ." (133) We are being told that all change is existential or substantial change. (See The Monist article cited above.) Now one kind of change is qualitative change as when a tomato goes from being green to being red. This can be understood to be a species of existence change if properties are assayed as tropes. The greenness trope in the tomato goes out of existence and a redness trope comes into existence while the tomato stays in existence. On this way of thinking, both the coming into existence of the tomato and its change of color are existential changes.
5) Objects (individual substances) change, but there are no events in addition to these changes. We need only the object and its tropes: we need no events such as the event of a leaf's turning brown. Furthermore, there is no event of a trope's going out of existence or coming into existence. If there were, a vicious infinite regress would ensue. (150) Events are "shadows cast by language rather than fundamental ingredients of temporal reality." (151) There are changes, but no events. I take Lowe to be saying that an event is an (illicit) reification of a change. If an animal dies, there is no such event as the animal's death in addition to the dead animal. There is just the animal which ceases to exist. (137)
6) Because there are no events, change cannot be ascribed to events. Because there is no such entity as my birth, my birth has no properties such as occurring at a certain place or being past. Because there are no events, no events change in their A-determinations, their monadic (non-relational) pastness, presentness, and futurity. There is thus no event, my birth, that was once future, then present, then past, and then ever more past. To think otherwise is to confuse events with objects, which amounts to a reification of events, an illicit treatment of them as if they are objects when all they could be are changes in objects.
7) It is not just that nothing has A-determinations; there are no such determinations to be had. McTaggart's A-determinations are pseudo-properties based on a "false analogy between events and objects." (136) There are no times, no events, and no A-determinations. This puts paid to McTaggart's claim that the A-series is contradictory, which is a key lemma in his overall argument for the unreality of time. That lemma requires that there be events and A-determinations. Very roughly, what McTaggart argues is that time is unreal because (i) time requires the A-series, but (ii) said series is contradictory in that each event has all three of the A-determinations. D. H. Mellor is a contemporary philosopher of time who accepts McTaggart's argument against the A-series, but concludes, not that time is unreal, but that time is exhausted by the B-series.
8) But if there are no events, then there is no B-series either. There is no series of events ordered by the so-called B-relations, earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with. This puts paid to the view of D. H. Mellor and others that real time (to allude to the title of Mellor's book) is exhausted by the B-series. For Lowe, then, there are no times, no events, no A-series, and no B-series.
9) For Lowe, time is objectively real; it is not unreal as on McTaggart's view, nor is it in any sense transcendentally ideal (Kant) or constituted in consciousness (Husserl). But it is not real in the manner of a container or a dimension. Time is just temporal passage. Since time is objectively real, temporal passage is also objectively real and in no way mind-dependent. Temporal passage "consists in the continual coming into and going out of existence of entities . . . ." (137) Lowe is referring to temporal entities only, those that are not timeless such as propositions. He has in mind objects (individual substances) such as a cat and its properties (assayed as tropes) such as being asleep. This ceaseless existential change is what temporal passage consists in. In sum, for Lowe, time = temporal passage = the ever ongoing creation and annihilation of entities.
As I read him, Lowe is not maintaining that to exist = to be temporally present tout court, but that for temporal items, to exist = to be temporally present. This makes him an existence presentist with respect to temporalia. Recall that for Lowe, all change is existential (substantial) change. See (4) supra.
10) We tend to think of time as the dimension of change, a fourth dimension in addition to the three spatial dimensions. We tend to assume that "time is a dimension in which reality as a whole is extended." (Monist, 283) If you think that objects persist by perduring, by having different temporal parts at different times, then you are making this assumption. But most, though not all, endurantists make the same assumption when they say that an object endures by being 'wholly present' at each time at which the object exists. Lowe denies that time is a dimension. For if there are no times ordered by the B-relations, earlier and later, then time is not a dimension. Reality is not temporally extended. Lowe seeks to uphold an endurantism that does not presuppose that time is a dimension.
11) Lowe's view of time is thoroughly dynamic by contrast with the static character of time on eternalism, and with the partially static and partially dynamic theories of Growing Block and Spotlight. The reality of time "consists simply in the reality of change . . . . (140) The latter "constitutes" temporal passage. This of course implies that without change, there is no time; but we can live with that. What's more, there are no events and there are no times, and so there is no present time. Lowe concludes that we need no account of what times are, and in particular, no "ersatzist" account of time in terms of abstract objects such as propositions. He is opposing views like that of Craig Bourne, for whom "a time is a set of propositions that states the other truths about what happens at that time." (A Future for Presentism, Oxford UP, 2006, 52.)
12) The view that all change is existential change commits Lowe to the view that properties of things in time are not universals but tropes or modes (particularized properties). These are not temporal parts of objects. (141) Tropes are therefore consistent with endurantism. Suppose that a changes from being F at t1 to G at t2. "We can continue to say that a itself exists at both t1 and t2 despite having no temporal parts, thus being, in that sense, 'wholly present' at both of these times." (141) I note in passing how Lowe helps himself to talk of times.
13) The object that has tropes is neither a bundle of tropes not a bare particular or substratum that supports them. The 'relation' between an object and its tropes is left unclear. (141).
14) Objects persist through changes in intrinsic properties. How? Change in intrinsic properties occurs when "monadic tropes" successively "come into and go out of existence while it (the object) stays in existence." (142)
15) Lowe's presentism: "When 'time passes' the content of reality itself changes — entities come into and go out of existence." This is intended "literally and absolutely." Going out of existence is absolute annihilation. (146) But then coming into existence would have to be creation out of nothing, would it not?
16) Yet "some things that exist today already existed yesterday." (146) For example, the very same person who exists and is 'wholly present' now also existed and was 'wholly present' yesterday. (146)
17) Only present objects and tropes exist. The sum-total of these entities is ever changing. What ceases to be present is annihilated. But not everything that exists at present is annihilated at the same time. Suppose Elliot, who was drunk yesterday, is sober today. Elliot yesterday co-existed with a D-trope, and Elliot today co-exists with an S-trope. The tropes, however, are not coexistent with each other since the D-trope was annihilated by the passage of time while the S-trope presently exists. Lowe's presentism thus implies the non-transitivity of co-existence. It also implies that, while temporal reality is ever created and annihilated by the passage of time, not everything is annihilated or created at the same time. The annihilation of Elliot's drunkenness left Elliot the object unscathed.
Part of an uncommonly good thread. Here is the entry to which the thread attaches.
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Anon,
My point was that many short comments are better than one long one.
One problem here is that I tossed out a word, 'tribalism,' but did not define it. What's worse is that I used it very loosely. Mea culpa. It is a stretch to think of women as a 'tribe.'
Perhaps we have a 'family' of tribalisms: racial, sexual, etc.
Now I'll take a stab at a definition:
I'm Caucasian as you may have guessed. But when I get up in the morning I don't look into the mirror and affirm: I am a white man! This is who I am most fundamentally. This is what makes me be ME. This fact is what constitutes my innermost identity and is that attribute upon which my value as a person primarily supervenes.
I am therefore not a racial tribalist by my definition. This is not to say that I am not white or that being white is not a part of WHAT I am, namely an animal, a bit of the world's fauna. Indeed, insofar as I am an animal, it is arguable that I am essentially (as opposed to accidentally) white if we grant Kripke's point about the essentiality of origin: if I could not have had parents other than the parents I in fact have, then, given that both are white, I could not have failed to be white. So I am essentially white.
But is it essential to WHO I am that I be white? (Related question: Are persons reducible to objects in the natural world?)
Now in my definition above there is the phrase "member of the race of which he happens to be a member" which suggests that it is a contingent fact about me that I am white. There is the animal that bears my name, an animal that is essentially white. But there is a sense, brought out by Thomas Nagel in various writings, in which I am contingently the animal I am. I am contingently an animal that is essentially white.
But now we are drifting towards some very deep waters.