Ingram, David orcid.org/0000-0002-0184-9271 (2016) The Virtues of Thisness Presentism. Philosophical Studies. 2867–2888. ISSN 0031-8116
Abstract
Presentists believe that only present things exist. But opponents insist this view has unacceptable implications: if only present things exist, we can’t express singular propositions about the past, since the obvious propositional constituents don’t exist, nor can we account for temporal passage, or the openness of the future. According to such opponents, and in spite of the apparent ‘common sense’ status of the view, presentism should be rejected on the basis of these unacceptable implications. In this paper, I present and defend a version of presentism (‘Thisness Presentism’) that avoids the unacceptable implications. The basic strategy I employ is familiar—I postulate presently existing entities to serve as surrogates (or ‘proxies’) for non-present entities—but some of the details of my proposal are more novel, and their application to these problems is certainly novel. One overarching thesis of this paper is that Thisness Presentism is preferable to other versions of presentism since it solves important problems facing standard iterations of the view. And I assume that this is a good positive reason in favour of the underlying thisness ontology.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2016. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (York) > Philosophy (York) |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 12 Feb 2020 09:30 |
Last Modified: | 08 Feb 2025 00:36 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0641-3 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s11098-016-0641-3 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:156884 |
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