How to Be a Presentist

Abstract This book develops an original version of presentism and defends it against numerous objections. Most notably, it is argued here that (i) presentists can respond to the ontological-commitment objection by endorsing a very general error theory about much of our ordinary and scientific discourse about the past and future. And it’s argued that (ii) presentists can plausibly and defensibly respond to the truthmaking objection by rejecting the relevant truthmaking principles (more specifically, by arguing that the sentences about the past and future that presentists think are true don’t have truthmakers, and aren’t made true by reality, because they don’t make claims about reality). And it’s argued that (iii) presentists can respond to the special-relativity objection not by endorsing the existence of a privileged frame of reference but by relativizing their view—i.e., by constructing a version of presentism that’s compatible with the relativity of simultaneity (and the non-existence of a privileged frame of reference). This book also argues for the metaphilosophical view that the presentism-vs-eternalism question is (if factual at all) an ordinary empirical question about (a contingent aspect of) physical reality that can’t be settled by a priori philosophical arguments. And it argues that presentists should reject the existence of time, and times (including the present time), and temporal passage—and, hence, that they should reject standard versions of the A-theory. The version of presentism developed in this book is highly original. It is a metaphysically thin, ontologically parsimonious view that can be thought of as an ordinary empirical hypothesis.