Thus Jesus to Pilate at John 18:36.
What does 'this world' refer to? In the "Our Father" we pray: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Reading these two texts side-by-side one might conclude that God's kingdom is to be realized on earth and not in a purely spiritual realm, and that therefore 'this world' at John 18:36 refers to this age of the earthly realm and not to the earthly realm as such.
Yes or no?
What follows in two parts is a critique of John Bigelow's Presentism and Properties. This installment is Part One.
Bigelow begins by telling us that he is a presentist: "nothing exists which is not present." (35) He goes on to say that this was believed by everyone, including philosophers, until the 19th century. But this is plainly false inasmuch as Plato maintained that there are things, the eidē, that exist but are not present, and this for the simple reason that they are not in time at all. Moreover, many theologians long before the 19th century held that God is eternal, as opposed to omnitemporal, and therefore not temporally present. (To underscore the obvious, when presentists use 'present' they mean temporally present, not spatially present or present in any other sense.)
But let's be charitable. What Bigelow means to tell us is that nothing exists in time that is not present. His is a thesis in temporal ontology, not in general ontology. What is there in time? Only present items, which is to say: no wholly past or wholly future items.
Bigelow also assures us that presentism "is written into the grammar of every natural language . . ." (ibid.) But this can't be right, for then anyone who denied presentism would be guilty of solecism! Surely 'Something exists which is not present' is not ungrammatical. The same holds for 'Something exists in time which is not present.' There is nothing ungrammatical in either sentence. If presentism "is written into the grammar of every natural language," then presentism reduces to a miserable tautology.
Tautologies, however, though of logical interest, are of no metaphysical interest. Luckily, Bigelow contradicts himself on the very next page where we read, "Presentism is a metaphysical doctrine . . . ." That is exactly right. It therefore cannot be a logico-grammatical truth. It is a substantive, non-tautological answer to a metaphysical/ontological question about what there is in time: only present items, or past, present, and future items?
What has to be understood is that, when a presentist claims that nothing exists that is not present, his use of 'exists' is not present-tensed, but tense-neutral. His claim is that only what exists (present-tense) exists simpliciter. For present purposes (pun intended), an item or category of item exists simpliciter if it must be mentioned in a complete inventory of what there is. I will use 'exists*' to refer to existence simpliciter and 'exists' in the usual present-tensed way.
Can presentism thus understood be refuted?
The argument from relations
1) All relations are existence-entailing. In the dyadic case, what this means is that if x stands to y in the relation R, then both x and y exist*, and necessarily so. In the n-adic case, it means that all of the relata of a relation must exist if the relation is to hold or obtain.
2) Some relations are such that they hold between a non-present item and a present item. For example, my non-present birth is earlier than my present blogging. The two events are related by the earlier-than relation.
Therefore
3) Both events, my birth and my blogging, exist*.
Therefore
4) It is not the case that only present items exist*: presentism is false.
This is a powerful argument, valid in point of logical form, but not absolutely conclusive, or as I like to say, rationally coercive, inasmuch as (1) is open to two counterexamples:
a) If there is a relation that connects an existent item to a nonexistent item, then (1) is false. Some hold that intentionality is such a relation. Suppose Tom, who exists, is thinking of Pegasus, who does not exist. For details, see The Twardowski-Meinong-Grossmann Solution to the Problem of Intentionality.
b) Premise (1) is also false if there are relations that connect one nonexistent item to another nonexistent item. It is true that Othello loves Desdemona. The truth-maker here is a state of affairs involving two nonexistent individuals. So a Meinongian might argue that not all relations are existence-entailing, and that (1) can be reasonably rejected, and with it the argument's conclusion. (See pp. 37-39)
To sidestep the second counterexample, Bigelow proposes a weaker premise according to which relations are not existence-entailing but existence-symmetric. A relation is existence-symmetric iff either all its relata exist or all do not exist.
The argument from causation
Causation is existence-symmetric: if an event exists and it is a cause of some other event, then that other event exists; and if an event exists and is caused by some other event, then that other event exists. Some present events are caused by events that are not present. And some present events are the causes of other events which are not present. Therefore things exist which are not present. (p. 40)
How can presentism be upheld in the face of these two powerful arguments? That is the topic of Part II.
We need editors, but too many an editor is a Besserwisser. The editorial know-it-all knows better than the author what he wants to say and how it ought to be said. At this point I hurl choice epithets.
I offer a more measured response in The Paltry Mentality of the Copy Editor.
CNN reported at the time that the footwear rule came into play after the local mountain rescue crews became exacerbated by having to rescue so many people tripping over their own feet. "These are difficult paths, in some cases, similar to mountain paths,” Patrizio Scarpellini, director of the Cinque Terre National Park, told CNN Travel. “Essential to have proper shoes!”
Written in December, 2012.
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When I study the writings of professional economists I often have to shake my shaggy philosopher's head. Try this passage on for size:
$16 trillion is the amount of Treasury debt outstanding at the moment. [It is around 36 trillion now.] The more relevant figure is the amount of debt the federal government owes to people and institutions other than itself. If, for some reason, I lent money to my wife and she promised to pay it back to me, we wouldn’t count that as part of the debt owed by our household. The debt owed to the public is about $10 trillion these days.
What a brainless analogy! Suppose I loan wifey 100 semolians. She issues me a 'debt instrument,' an IOU. Has the family debt increased by $100? Of course not. It is no different in principle than if I took $100 out of my left pocket, deposited an IOU there, and placed the cash in my right pocket. If I started with exactly $100 cash on my person I would end the game with exactly the same amount.
But I do not stand to the government in the same relation that I stand to myself or to my family. Suppose I buy $100 K worth of Treasury notes, thereby loaning the government that sum. Has the Federal debt increased by $100 K? Of course it has. I am not part of the government. Whether the government owes money to U. S. citizens or to the Chi-Coms makes no difference at all with respect to the amount of the debt. The citizens plus the government do not form a "household" in the way my wife and I form a household. Citizens and government are not all one big happy family.
The analogy is pathetic. Didn't Barack Hussein Obama say that the government is us? That is bullshit pure and simple out of the mouth of a master bullshitter.
The author would have you think that "the more relevant figure" is $16 trillion minus $10 trillion = $6 trillion. False, because based on a false analogy.
This shows how ideologically infected the 'science' of economics is. Only a leftist ideologue could make the collectivist assumption that I have just exposed. The Marxian "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a viable principle at the level of the family, but it is pernicious nonsense on stilts when applied to the state in its relation to the citizenry.
But then I am no economist. Show me I'm wrong, and lunch is on me when next our paths cross.
Did you settle accounts with the Infernal Revenue 'Service'? If yes, then celebrate with The Beatles, Harrison and Clapton, and Tom Petty.
No, I am not opposed to paying taxes. I am not anti-tax any more than I am anti-government. We need government, and we need to fund it somehow. It does not follow, however, that there must be an income tax. There are alternatives.
We paid 14% of our 2024 income in federal and state income taxes. What did you pay?
Did we get value for our money? We got Biden-Harris. That suffices for an answer. No need to get scatological about it. We are very lucky, however, that our geopolitical adversaries did not take the opportunity to pounce on us in our Biden-induced weakness. They wouldn't dare do that now.
Say what you want about tariffs, but one thing is blindingly evident: it is utter folly to be dependent on one's enemies for such essentials as pharmaceuticals and semiconductors, to mention just two classes of goods we cannot do without. And say what you want about Trump, but he alone has the cojones to end this insane dependency. The Dems are for it, and the Republicans would only talk about it. Too bad the moniker 'Big Balls' is already taken . . . .
. . . and the political ponerology of Leftism.
A Substack article from exactly one year ago.
Wherein I shovel some (un?)seriously scientistic caca into the sewer of nada.
"There are currently five major streams of Protestant political outlook and activism."
1) The old Religious Left
2) The old Religious Right
3) The neo-Anabaptist Left
4) MAGA Christianity
5) TheoBro Right
Finally, there is the TheoBro right, which wants a Christian confessional state that legally privileges Christianity as the only remedy for defeating the Left. Some of its leaders openly denounce voting rights for women as a liberal, modern corruption that undermines the family. Its denizens are not very numerous but have a high profile through social media. And its influence exceeds its numbers because it is aligned with much of MAGA Christianity. Its chief literature is Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism. Many of its followers descend from Calvinist entrepreneur Doug Wilson of Moscow, Idaho. The American Reformer is its chief online exponent.
You are list-obsessive if you write down an already completed task just so you can cross it off your list. You are precision-obsessive if you point out that a task, completed or not, is not the sort of thing that can be crossed off a list.
An admirable concern for precision can veer off into pedantry, punctiliousness, preciosity.
Attributes are at the things to which they are attributed. Existence, then, is in a broad sense an attribute of existing items despite adding nothing to the quiddity of the thing to which it is attributed apart from its capacity to have a quiddity.
Certainly not the O. J. Simpson trial!
Top o' the Stack.
Tony Flood writes,
I'm proud of this, Bill.
And you're the only one I know who would appreciate it.The work they did to "internalize" all the links on my clunky old site is impressive. Langer scholars (I'm told) love my prefatory notes, so they asked if they could host my Langer "portal." I told them my old site's lifespan is a function of mine and therefore they should grab whatever they wish promiscuously.I've moved beyond Langer, of course, but enjoyed curating those items. Now they will be available to scholars on a more permanent basis (at least for the rest of this dispensation.
My wife and I owned a house in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, on Euclid Heights Boulevard, from 1986-1991. That location put me within walking distance of the old Arabica coffee house on Coventry Road. The Coventry district was quite a Bohemian scene in those days and there I met numerous interesting characters of the sort one expects to find in coffee houses: the flâneur and flâneuse, wannabe poets and novelists, pseudo-intellectual bullshitters of every stripe, and a wide range of chess players from patzers to masters.
It was there that I became acquainted with International Master Calvin Blocker. Observing a game of mine one day, he kibitzed, "You'd be lucky to be mated."
One day he came to my house to give me a lesson. He pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down from memory the famous game in which the great Paul Morphy crushed Count Isouard and the Duke of Braunschweig in 17 moves. "Study this," Calvin said.
Here is his story.
Harvey Pekar talks about Coventry.
For the true chess aficionado, here is 45 minutes of Grandmaster Ben Finegold on Calvin Blocker.
