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Presentism, eternalism and where things are located

Viebahn, Emanuel (2018) Presentism, eternalism and where things are located. [Preprint]

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Abstract

In several recent papers, Daniel Deasy has argued that the presentism-eternalism debate is unclear and should be abandoned. According to Deasy, there is no way of spelling out the predicate ‘is present’ that leads to a satisfactory definition of presentism: on some interpretations, presentism turns out to be compatible with eternalism, on others, it is clearly false or unacceptable for other reasons. The aim of this paper is to show that this line of argument should be resisted: if the predicate ‘is present’ is spelled out in terms of where things are located, the result is a definition of presentism that is neither compatible with eternalism nor clearly false. There is thus no need to abandon the debate between presentists and eternalists.


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Item Type: Preprint
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Viebahn, Emanuelemanuel.viebahn@hu-berlin.de
Additional Information: Forthcoming in Synthese
Keywords: philosophy of time; presentism; eternalism; transientism; permanentism; tense; restrictor principle
Subjects: General Issues > Scientific Metaphysics
Specific Sciences > Physics
Depositing User: Dr. Emanuel Viebahn
Date Deposited: 18 May 2018 19:07
Last Modified: 18 May 2018 19:07
Item ID: 14672
Subjects: General Issues > Scientific Metaphysics
Specific Sciences > Physics
Date: 2018
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/14672

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