>> the presentist idea is not adequately captured by saying that wholly past items no longer exist, since all who understand English will agree to that. The presentist idea is that wholly past items do not exist at all.<\/span><\/p>\n But what does \u2018exist at all\u2019 mean?<\/span><\/p>\n BV: That's part of the problem and part of the fun. You are not saying anything metaphysical when you say that Boston's Scollay Square no longer exists. You are simply pointing out an historical fact. You are not committing yourself to presentism or any version of anti-presentism such as 'eternalism' (a howling misnomer if you want my opinion). You are not 'committing metaphysics' if I may coin a phrase. Committing metaphysics, the presentist is saying that Scollay Square does not exist at all: it is NOTHING because it is wholly past. That is surely not obvious or commonsensical or the view of the man in the street.<\/span><\/p>\n To see that, consider that Scollay Square is, as we speak, the intentional object of veridical<\/em> memories, and the subject of true<\/em> predications, e.g., 'Scollay Square attracted many a horny young sailor on shore leave.' How then could it be NOTHING? It seems obviously to be SOMETHING, indeed something wholly determinate and wholly actual<\/em> despite being wholly past. If you say the famous square exists tenselessly at times earlier than the present time (the time simultaneous with my writing), then you uphold its existence but open yourself up to questions about what exactly tenseless existence is, questions that are as easy to formulate as they are hard (or impossible) to answer satisfactorily. Cashing out 'exists at all' in terms of 'exists tenselessly ' is the main way of explaining it. <\/span><\/p>\n >> it does not exist, period<\/span><\/p>\n Same question. What do \u2018period\u2019 and \u2018at all\u2019 add?<\/span><\/p>\n BV: 'Period,' 'full stop,' 'at all,' simpliciter<\/em>, sans phrase<\/em> — I am using these as stylistic variants of one another. See above response.<\/span><\/p>\n >> But note carefully that the second formulation is accurate only if 'exists' is not read as present-tensed, in which case the formulation is tautological, but as 'exists simpliciter,' in which case it is not.<\/span><\/p>\n So what does simpliciter add?<\/span><\/p>\n BV: See the first response.<\/span><\/p>\n >> What exactly it means to 'exist at all' or to 'exist 'simpliciter' is part of the problem of formulating a coherent version of presentism that can withstand close scrutiny. For present purposes we will assume that we understand well enough what these phrases mean.<\/span><\/p>\n Yes to the first sentence, no to the second (speaking for myself, perhaps others understand).<\/span><\/p>\n BV: But surely, Ed, you understand more or less and well enough to have this discussion. Or are you feigning incomprehension? Or petering out (insider jargon that alludes to Peter van Inwagen's habit of saying that he doesn't understand something.) I will assume that you are not feigning or petering, but doing what analytic philosophers do, namely, demanding CLARITY. Fine. But can't you see that there is a difference between holding that the wholly past is nothing at all and holding that the wholly past is not nothing at all? This is the great problem of the reality of the past. My view is that it is a genuine problem, not a pseudo-problem, but that it is insoluble by us. I don't mean that one cannot give a solution to it. I mean that one cannot give a finally satisfactory solution to it. That makes me a solubility skeptic about this problem.<\/span><\/p>\n >> As Feser himself says, on presentism, "there are no past events,"<\/span><\/p>\n OK, but there clearly were past events. I wonder if the whole problem rests on an equivocation. We read "there are no past events" as "there were no past events" which has the whiff of paradox and mystery. I caught myself in that equivocation exactly as I was reading it, followed by a double take. Well of course there are no past events, because they have passed over. But there were such things.<\/span><\/p>\n Of course you are well aware of that, and we have been on opposite sides of the question for many years. You feel there is some non-trivial sense in which "there are no past events" can be true. I fail to grasp that sense.<\/span><\/p>\n BV: You think the following are both obvious: (a) There were past events, and (b) There are no past events. I will grant you that (a) is practically self-evident although not perfectly obvious. Could not the universe have started up right at the beginning of the present with dusty books, etc, as Russell once suggested? Is that not a logical possibility? I can't take that seriously as a real possibility because it implies that there were no past presents — which seems to commit us to the Solipsism of the Present Moment. <\/span><\/p>\n But I disagree with you about (b). You think (b) is obvious. In one sense it is. It is obvious if 'there are' is in the present tense. For then you are saying, trivially, that there are now no (wholly) past events. But in another sense (b) is not obvious, although it might be either false or incoherent. Distinguished philosophers have maintained that there are tenselessly events that are past in the sense that they are earlier than present events, where the A-determination (McTaggart) 'present'' is cashed out B-theoretically.<\/span><\/p>\n Is there some non-trivial sense in which 'there are no past events' could be true? You say that if there is such a sense, you cannot grasp it. I say that there is such a sense and that I can grasp it. <\/span><\/p>\n I can grasp it because I can grasp what the (unqualified) presentist is saying. He is saying that when a temporal item such as an event loses the A-determination presentness, it becomes nothing at all. It is annihilated. I can understand that because I can understand how it might not be annihilated. It would not be annihilated if (i) there are no irreducible A-determinations, where such a determination is irreducible if irreducible to a B-relation, or (ii) there are irreducible A-determinations but they have no bearing on the tenseless existence of events and other temporal items.<\/span><\/p>\n Alles klar?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n Gotta meet a man for lunch. <\/span><\/p>\n Here is London Ed, recently returned from his African sojourn, raising some good questions anent my entry, A Critique of Edward Feser's Defense of Presentism, Part I: >> the presentist idea is not adequately captured by saying that wholly past items no longer exist, since all who understand English will agree to that. The presentist … Continue reading “Existence Simpliciter<\/i>“<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[142,204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-existence","category-time-and-change"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3857\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"