Presentism and Properties

Abstract

I am a presentist: nothing exists which is not present. I say that this was believed by everyone, both the philosophers and the folk, until at least the nineteenth century; it is written into the grammar of every natural language; and it is still assumed in everday life even by philosophers who officially deny it. The content of this doctrine is not easy to grasp, is best explained by comparing presentism with its rivals, and will I hope become somewhat clearer during the course of this paper. Presentism was assumed by everyone everywhere, until a new conception of time began to trickle out of the high Newtonianism of the nineteenth century. The Christians' Holy Bible says that there is no new thing under the sun but this is not true, at least not in the sense which first comes to mind out of context. The so-called fourdimensionalist theory of time was something genuinely new, when it gradually came into being last century. Anti-presentist theories began to be articulated by philosophers late in the nineteenth century and have been expounded through the twentieth century. Bergson denied presentism and influenced literary figures like Proust and Eliot. Russell, Reichenbach, Smart, Quine, Lewis and many other anglophonic, analytic philosophers also denied presentism though in a different way. (I make no pretense to understand where Heidegger's Being and Time stands with respect to presentism and fourdimensionalism.) The defenders of fourdimensionalism are very impressive. I have, however, been encouraged in my hankering for presentism by papers and conversations with Phil Hanson, Steve Savitt, Mark Hinchliff, Andrew Holster, Caroline Lierse, David Oderberg, George Schlesinger and Quentin Smith and others. Furthermore, the exponential explosion of timetravel stories in the popular media, beginning late in the nineteenth century, is an indication that a very new conception of time is brewing in the Zeitgeist. The utter absence of any timetravel stories whatsoever prior to the nineteenth century is a profoundly puzzling fact. See references for Ash, Bailey, Davenport, Philips, Scholes and Rabkin for material on the emergence of