Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Presentism, Eternalism, and the Triviality Problem
- 2 Weak Interactions: Asymmetry of Time or Asymmetry in Time?
- 3 Presentism and the Flow of Time
- 4 Presentism and the Notion of Existence
- 5 Meyer’s Struggle with Presentism or How We Can Understand the Debate between Presentism and Eternalism
- 6 Dynamic Presentism and the Grounding Objection
- 7 Brute Past Presentism, Dynamic Presentism, and the Objection from Being-Supervenience
- 8 Entropy and the Direction of Time
- Bibliography
- Index of Subjects
- Index of Names
7 - Brute Past Presentism, Dynamic Presentism, and the Objection from Being-Supervenience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Presentism, Eternalism, and the Triviality Problem
- 2 Weak Interactions: Asymmetry of Time or Asymmetry in Time?
- 3 Presentism and the Flow of Time
- 4 Presentism and the Notion of Existence
- 5 Meyer’s Struggle with Presentism or How We Can Understand the Debate between Presentism and Eternalism
- 6 Dynamic Presentism and the Grounding Objection
- 7 Brute Past Presentism, Dynamic Presentism, and the Objection from Being-Supervenience
- 8 Entropy and the Direction of Time
- Bibliography
- Index of Subjects
- Index of Names
Summary
Presentism faces the following well-known dilemma: either the truth-value of pasttense claims depends on the non-existing past and cannot be said to supervene on being, or it supervenes on present reality and breaks our intuition which says that the true past-tense claims should not depend on any present aspect of reality. This chapter shows that the solution to the dilemma offered by Kierland and Monton’s brute past presentism, the version of presentism according to which the past is supposed to be both a fundamental and present aspect of reality, is implausible and proposes how to cure presentism: the dilemma can be avoided by taking a third road consisting of introducing dynamics into presentism in the form of the real passage of time. Dynamic presentism, which is constructed in such a way, can overcome the dilemma by providing an ontological basis for the past-tense propositions in the form of the real past. Dynamic presentism also offers a rationale for treating the future as being open.
Introduction
Presentism, the view that the way things are is the way things presently are, faces the following well-known difficulty for all presentists: what is the ontological basis for true past-tense claims such as, for example, “Socrates was a philosopher,” if the past does not exist. This entails the following dilemma which Brian Kierland and Bradley Monton (2007) tried to solve:
Dilemma: either truth-value of past-tense claims depends on the non-existing past and cannot be said to supervene on being, or it supervenes on present reality and breaks our intuition which says that the true past-tense claims should not depend on any present aspect of reality.
Solving this dilemma, the authors developed the view which is a version of presentism they termed brute past presentism (BPP). According to this view, in addition to the standard thesis of presentism which claims that the only things that exist are presently existing things, it claims that the past is supposed to be a fundamental aspect of reality and—at the same time—a present aspect of reality.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- In Defence of a Dynamic View of Reality , pp. 129 - 144Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2022