{"id":4394,"date":"2018-07-25T15:52:45","date_gmt":"2018-07-25T15:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/07\/25\/presentism-misunderstood\/"},"modified":"2018-07-25T15:52:45","modified_gmt":"2018-07-25T15:52:45","slug":"presentism-misunderstood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/07\/25\/presentism-misunderstood\/","title":{"rendered":"Presentism Misunderstood"},"content":{"rendered":"

One misunderstanding floated in the Facebook Medieval Logic <\/a>forum is that presentism in the current analytic philosophy of time is the thesis that 'exists' and 'is present' are synonyms.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Not at all. It is obvious that 'exists' and 'is present' do not have the same meaning or sense. If I say that God exists, I need not be  saying that God is present, and this  for the simple reason that God, if eternal as opposed to everlasting, is 'outside of time' and therefore neither past, nor present, nor future.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Some philosophers hold that numbers and other so-called 'abstract objects' are timeless entities.  If they are, then they are precisely not present.  A fortiori<\/em>, they are not past or future either.  If they exist, then they exist 'outside of time.'  But then 'exists' and 'is present' can't have the same meaning.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now suppose there are no timeless entities and that everything is 'in time.'  It would still not be the case that 'exists' and 'is present' have the same meaning or sense.  The following questions make sense and are substantive in the sense that they do not have trivial answers:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Is everything that exists present? Or are there things that exist that are not present?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But the following questions have trivial answers:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Is everything present present? Or are there present things that are not present?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The answer to the first question in the second pair is a tautology and thus trivially true. The answer to the second is a contradiction and thus trivially false.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since the first two questions are substantive, 'exists' and 'is present' are not synonyms.<\/span><\/p>\n

G. E. Moore famously responded to the hedonist's claim that the only goods are pleasures by asking, in effect: But is pleasure good<\/em>?  The point is that the sense of 'good' allows us reasonably to resist the identification of goodness and pleasure.  For it remains an open question<\/em> whether pleasure really is good. Similarly, the sense of 'exists' allows us reasonably to resist the identification of existence and temporal presentness. If a thing exists it remains an open question whether it is present.  There exists a prime number between 3 and 7. 'Is it present?' is a legitimate question. It won't be if numbers are timeless.  So again we see that 'exists' and 'is present' are not synonymous expressions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Consider now my cat Max. Max exists (present tense) and he is temporally present. Is his existence exhausted by his temporal presence? Or is he temporally present because he exists? These are legitimate questions. It is not obvious that Max's existence is exhausted by his temporal presentness. It could be that there is more to his existence than his temporal presentness.  Since these questions make sense and are substantive, it follows that 'existence' and 'temporal presentness' are not synonyms.<\/span><\/p>\n

If the presentist is not making a synonymy claim, what claim is he making? One type of presentist puts forth the following equivalence:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

P. Necessarily, for all items x in time, x (tenselessly) exists iff x is present.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is not a semantic claim, but an ontological claim, a claim about what exists.  The presentist  is saying that a correct ontological inventory of temporal items restricts them to present items.  As opposed to what? As opposed to the 'pastist' who holds that the ontological inventory counts both past and present items as existing, and the the 'eternalist' who includes past, present, and future items in the count.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ed the medievalist writes,<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

I know nothing about the modern view of presentism, or where the term \u2018presentism\u2019 comes from. Is the view that the extension of \u2018(temporally) present men\u2019 and \u2018men who exist\u2019 could change so that some men could be in the present while no longer existing? Or so that some men could exist while no longer being in the present?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Absolutely not. Presentism implies that every present man exists, and every existing man is present. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One misunderstanding floated in the Facebook Medieval Logic forum is that presentism in the current analytic philosophy of time is the thesis that 'exists' and 'is present' are synonyms.   Not at all. It is obvious that 'exists' and 'is present' do not have the same meaning or sense. If I say that God exists, I … Continue reading “Presentism Misunderstood”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-time-and-change"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4394","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=4394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}