Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Vallicella on existence-entailing relations and presentism


Bill Vallicella continues his critical response to my defense of presentism in Aristotle’s Revenge.  In the first part of his critique (to which I responded in an earlier post), Bill raised the influential “truthmaker objection” against presentism.  In his latest post, he rehearses another popular objection, which appeals to the nature of relations.  I don’t think this objection is any more formidable than the truthmaker objection, but here too Bill disagrees.
    
The objection goes like this.  For at least some relations, it seems that both relata have to exist in order for the relation to hold.  For example, if I am standing next to you, the relation a is next to b holds of us precisely because you and I both exist.  Now a causes b seems to be that sort of relation as well.  Something non-existent can hardly cause anything, and if something has been caused, it too must exist. 

Now, presentism claims that within the temporal domain, only present objects and events exist.  (I say “within the temporal domain” because, as I noted in my earlier post, a presentist could hold that in addition to presently existing objects and events there are also things that exist in an eternal or aeviternal way.)  But then (so it is claimed) it seems we have a problem.  For suppose we say that Caesar’s assassination is among the things that have caused me to refer to it just now.  Caesar and his assassination, being past, do not exist.  So how can they be causally related to me?  Hence (it is concluded) presentism cannot account for such relations.

Many contemporary philosophers seem to regard this as a real chin-puller, but once again (and with nothing but respect for my good pal Bill) I find it difficult to stifle a yawn.  The reason is this.  From the commonsense point of view, and the Aristotelian point of view that systematizes it, causal and other relations don’t require that both relata exist now.  They just require that they exist at some time.  Hence, for Caesar’s assassination to be among the things that cause me to refer to it, it suffices that Caesar and his assassination did exist in the past, not that they now exist.  

In his latest post, Bill objects:

But this is not the operative assumption. The operative assumption is simply that for an n-adic relation to hold between or among n relata, all the relata have to exist, period. They have to exist simpliciter; they don't have to exist now

End quote.  I do think Bill is missing the point.  For the claim that the relata “have to exist, period” or “have to exist simpliciter” is simply not one that the presentist would accept in the first place.  For where temporal phenomena are concerned, there just is no existence period or existence simpliciter in the “timeless” sense Bill seems to have in mind.  There is only what exists now, what used to exist but no longer does, and what will exist.  To insist that relations within the temporal realm must involve things that exist simpliciter (as opposed to existing now or being the sort of thing that used to exist) is simply to beg the question against presentism.

This should be even more obviously true of the example Bill himself actually uses, which is the relation a is earlier than b.  Does the truth of a proposition like Caesar’s assassination was earlier than Feser’s writing this blog post require that both events exist simpliciter?  Why on earth would a presentist agree with that assumption?  On the contrary, the presentist should say that a relation like a is earlier than b is precisely an Exhibit A case in which the items related do not exist at the same time.  In particular, it is a relation such that a had ceased to exist by the time b had come into existence. If the critic of presentism doesn’t like this way of talking, and insists that a and b must exist simpliciter, that is his problem, not the presentist’s.  The burden is on the critic to provide an argument for taking this insistence seriously.  It will not do for him to pretend that he has raised some devastating objection when the objection in fact rests on a question-begging assumption.

To be sure, Bill writes:

It is important to bear in mind that the presentist too must make use of the notion of existence simpliciter.  The thesis of presentism is not the logical truth that whatever exists (present-tense) exists now.  It is the thesis that whatever exists simpliciter exists now.  Equivalently: only present items exist simpliciter.  From this it follows that wholly past items such as the event of my having eaten lunch do not exist simpliciter. But then the objection is up and running.

End quote.  But the objection is not up and running, and again it seems to me that Bill is missing the point.  Yes, Caesar’s assassination does not now exist simpliciter (if one insists on talking that way).  But it did exist simpliciter at one time, and that is enough for it to bear a causal relation to me.

Bill says:

To fully savor the problem we cast it in the mold of an aporetic tetrad:

1. All genuine relations are either existence-entailing or existence-symmetric.

2. Earlier than is a genuine relation.

3. Presentism: only temporally present items exist.

4. Some events are earlier than others.

Each limb of the tetrad is exceedingly plausible.  But they cannot all be true:  any three, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining limb.  For example, the first three entail the negation of the fourth.  To solve the problem, we must reject one of the limbs.  

End quote.  Now, the trouble with this is that proposition 1 is ambiguous.  Both sides would agree that there is a sense in which the relations in question entail existence.  For example, both sides would agree that unicorns cannot cause anything, because they don’t exist and never did.  But the presentist would say that some relations (such as a is earlier than b, and a causes b) require only that the relata did exist at some time, whereas the critic of presentism insists that the relations require something else.  

Require what, exactly?  That the relata both exist now?  The critic of presentism will deny that that is what he is saying.  But what, then?  That one of the relata exists at one point in time and that the other exists at another point in time, where both points in time are equally real?  But if that is what the critic means, then he is begging the question against presentism, since the presentist denies that past and future points in time are real.  

What is going on with the objection from existence-entailing relations, I would argue, is that an essentially non-presentist conception of temporal existence is inadvertently smuggled in as if it were neutral ground on which both sides could formulate and debate the objection.  And it is a conception that is very far from a commonsense or Aristotelian way of understanding time.

Now, it is important to note that in Aristotle’s Revenge, I defend the commonsense/Aristotelian conception of time at some length before I ever get to recherché contemporary objections to presentism like the truthmaker objection and the objection from existence-entailing relations.  The reason is that I think these objections sound remotely plausible only if one has already gotten far away from common sense – for example, if one has started to think of time as if it were like space, so that past and future events are like distant spatial locations.  For only then does it start to seem intelligible that a past or future event might be said to exist even though it is not present.  

When a philosopher says, of something that exists in time (as opposed to eternally or aeviternally), “Sure, it doesn’t exist now, but does it exist simpliciter?”, I am inclined to channel Wittgenstein and say that language has gone on holiday.  We are no longer using “exists” in a way that reflects time as we ordinarily understand it.  Rather, we are using it in some highly theoretical sense that reflects a tendentious reconstruction of the notion of time.  (In fact, I would say, it reflects an abandonment of the notion of time and its replacement with some quasi-spatialized ersatz.)

That doesn’t by itself entail that that theoretical sense is wrong – though I certainly think it is – but it does mean that, since it is tendentious, it ought not to be put forward as if it were neutral ground on which to construct an aporia.  

Something similar is going on with the truthmaker objection.  From a commonsense presentist point of view, the “truthmaker” for the proposition that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March is the fact that Caesar really was assassinated on the Ides of March, and nothing more need be said.  There are facts about what was the case just as there are facts about what is the case.  Facts about what was the case will seem problematic only if one supposes that all facts must be of the same type, and describable in some timeless way – that is to say, only if one begs the question against presentism.

Part of what is going here, I would suggest, is that the critic of presentism is thinking, no doubt without realizing it, in a kind of Parmenidean way.  “There is just what is, full stop, and what is not, full stop!”  And Lesson 1 of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy is that that is a deep mistake, and the source of countless other mistakes.  Carving the territory up into “what is” and “what is not” (or what exists simpliciter and what does not) is too crude.  We need, for example, to recognize that between actuality and nothingness, there is potentiality, which is real even though it is not actual.  We need to see that in addition to what is, we can speak of what was and what will be.  We need to realize that notions like being, real, and existence are analogical, applied in related but still distinct senses to distinct kinds of thing.  And so forth.  Reality is simply more nuanced than the Parmenidean supposes.

Another factor, I think, is the prevalence of the time travel motif in contemporary pop culture.  Now, I love time travel stories and always have.  But metaphysically speaking, they are sheer incoherent nonsense (for reasons I set out at length in Aristotle’s Revenge).  They seem to work only if one doesn’t think too carefully about them.  The trouble is that a steady diet of this kind of stuff has given people muddleheaded views about time.  They start to think of past and future objects and events as if they are, or at least could be, “out there” somewhere, but just hard or impossible to reach.  In short, they start to think in an essentially “eternalist” way about time, without realizing it.  Then they hear an objection like the truthmaker objection or the objection from existence-entailing relations and think “Hmm, good point,” because they suppose it makes sense in the first place (as the presentist does not, or should not) to think that past and future events might exist to serve as relata or truthmakers.  

In fact, I would say, such objections can be seen to be non-starters when one approaches them from the point of view of the correct conception of the nature of time, which (I would argue) is the commonsense Aristotelian conception.  Hence, as I say, I defend that conception at considerable length in Aristotle’s Revenge before I discuss the contemporary objections in question.  

Longtime readers know that it is a recurring theme of my work that the standard moves made by contemporary philosophers where issues in natural theology, ethics, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and other areas of philosophy are concerned typically rest on presuppositions that Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers would reject, and ignore ideas that Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers would defend.  The same thing is true in the philosophy of time.  Here as elsewhere, getting things right requires getting outside the box in which the debate is usually conducted.

171 comments:

  1. How is it possible to be a presentist while also believing in omniscience and immutability? If new moments of time come into existence, then God must learn about these new things which would be an intrinsic change in God himself.

    Also, doesn't God comprehend all moments of time in a single timeless 'now', which just is to affirm eternalism?

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    1. I've addressed this issue elsewhere (in Five Proofs). The objection rests on a couple of basic errors. First, you are treating eternity as if it were some perspective which is simultaneous with all points in time, from which God knows all those points. That is precisely what it is not. That effectively makes it temporal, when the whole point is that it is not temporal.

      Second, you are mistakenly modeling divine knowledge as a kind of observation by which God learns what is happening in the world. That is not what it is at all, and God doesn't "learn" anything, not successively and not even in a single timeless act. Rather, God knows the world by virtue of knowing himself as its cause. And what he causes is a world in which things happen successively. It doesn't follow that he knows it via some sort of succession of observations or the like. Nor does it follow that he is observing all moments of time at once. He is not observing it at all, any more than an author knows his novel by observing the characters and events in it.

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    2. But how can God know the world by knowing himself without entailing modal fatalism? God exists in all possible worlds and knows himself in all possible worlds.

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    3. It does lead to modal collapse at a recent panel on divine simplicity William lane Craig made J. Brian Huffling (Thomist) petty much concede that Gods nature (modeled ala simplicity) implies modal collapse. Fortunately Spinoza and Hegelian idealists accept this and on their systems modal collapse actually equates to non-externally constrained divine freedom.

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    4. 1. Does God know what time it is now? [Kenny]

      2. If God knows what's happening in the world as an author knows the characters in his book, then does it make any sense for God to blame us for our bad choices? [Harry Potter might blame Draco Malfoy for plotting against him, but J. K. Rowling cannot do so, as she's the one making him act the way he does.]

      3. Re causality: shouldn't we be drawing a distinction between per se causality (which does require simultaneity) and per accidensper se cause of my referring to it, although perhaps my [presently existing] memory of having read about it is.

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    5. Sorry. That last paragraph should read:

      3. Re causality: shouldn't we be drawing a distinction between per se causality (which does require simultaneity) and per accidens causality (which doesn't)? Caesar's assassination in 44 B.C. isn't the per se cause of my referring to it now, although perhaps my [presently existing] memory of having read about it is.

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    6. @Tom

      There's nothing per se about a God knowing what happens in the world through knowing himself as an author. Knowing yourself as the cause doesn't entail that you must cause one and only thing.

      Ofcourse, it's when it's combined with divine simplicity that things get slippery.

      @Tim
      I think Huffling failed in his exposition of divine simplicity to evade the modal fatalism objection. However, I think Stump is the way to go.

      Dr. Feser, would you consider your view of omniscience to be like Garigou-Lagrange? He was explicit that it's a theological determinist position. Would you agree with that it do you think the primary/secondary cause distinction makes a difference?

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    7. @Aristotle's Jedi and Tim
      Divine simplicity alone does not result in modal collapse. The problem is when divine simplicity is coupled with the thesis that God knows the world by knowing himself.

      How does God know that the world exists? If we say that he knows that the world exists by knowing himself, we have a problem. God cannot know a contingent fact by peering into his own nature (i.e. by knowing himself) because his nature is necessary. Some might say he knows not only his nature but his choices by "knowing himself" but this is incompatible with divine simplicity. Therefore, to preserve the contingency of the world we have to say that God knows the world but not by knowing himself (his nature)

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    8. @Vincent,
      Why can't JK Rowling blame Malfoy? In stories where an evil character suffers misfortune, we would see that as just. The character got what he deserved.

      I admit that it is intuitively strange to think of Rowling blaming Malfoy. But I think this strangeness comes from thinking of Malfoy as a character in his wrongdoing but as a real person (like JK Rowling) when he is being blamed or punished. If we remember that he is only blamed and punished WITHIN the story, then the idea isn't so strange after all. But in the analogy of God as the author and creation as his story, we creatures will always be within the story

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    9. Hi Tom,

      Why can't J.K. Rowling blame Malfoy? Well, just ask yourself these questions:

      Can Malfoy resist J.K. Rowling's wishes?
      Can Malfoy do anything other than what J.K. Rowling wants him to do?

      I just had another thought. It seems to me that Ed's position on presentism is incoherent for the same reason that his position on qualia is inconsistent. (Ed believes qualia are objectively real, but also believes that God understand things perfectly without the aid of qualia.)

      So here's the dilemma:

      1. Ed believes that talk about "the present" is basic and irreducible: it cannot be properly expressed in non-temporal terms. Likewise, talk about first-person qualia cannot be expressed in third-person terms.

      2. If talk about X cannot be expressed in terms of Y, then X cannot be understood in terms of Y.

      3. God has a complete understanding of everything, including "the present" and qualia.

      4. God's understanding is in no way time-bound (rather, it is atemporal - hence, no "now") and in no way passive (hence, no qualia).

      I put it to you and to Ed that all four propositions cannot be true.

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    10. @Vincent,

      I have no idea why you are putting to me and to Prof Feser this dilemma. I did not bring up presentism directly or qualia at all. Moreover, I am not a presentist.

      As to JK Rowling blaming Malfoy: it is true that Malfoy cannot do anything other than what Rowling causes him to do. But this by itself is not sufficient to show that Malfoy is not blameworthy unless you add an additional premise. There is a further problem however. The fact that Malfoy cannot do anything other than what Rowling causes him to do doesn't even show that Malfoy's actions are determined. What you would have to show is that Rowling's causation is prior to Malfoy's action, otherwise you just are stuck with necessity of supposition which of course is compatible with libertarian freedom. But rather than get into the weeds with Rowling, at least as it pertains to God, God's actions pertaining to creation are not prior to creation (or if they are, they are identical with God and therefore not necessitating).

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    11. Hi Tim,

      Thanks for clarifying that you are not a presentist.

      You wrote: "What you would have to show is that Rowling's causation is prior to Malfoy's action..." Surely this is correct: Rowling is the author. But even when we consider God and Creation, this is still true. You maintain that "God's actions pertaining to creation are not prior to creation" and I agree that they are not temporally prior. However, they are metaphysically prior, in the way that a cause is prior to its effect, even when cause and effect are simultaneous and the cause does not temporally precede the effect. Thus time is not required for priority.

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    12. Vincent,

      Causes are metaphysically prior to their effects. God is the cause of the universe. He is prior to the universe. What I am denying is the claim that in order to create the world God must engage in some action which in turn causes the universe. I think he brings it about directly. This means that God's actions pertaining to the universe is not prior to the universe. This position works the best with divine simplicity and is independently plausible. It has been defended by people like Jeff Brower and Tim O'Connor, my guess is that you are familiar with their work.

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    13. Hi Tom,

      Just to be clear: I'm not saying that in order to create the world God must engage in some other, prior action which in turn causes the universe. But I do insist that in order to create the world, God must engage in some sort of action (even if it's just the action of "creating"), which is prior to the choices made by the rational creatures whom God creates. To suppose that God causes the world (and our choices) to be, without doing anything at all (even performing an act of will - "Let there be light!"), would be the ultimate case of "Look, Ma! No hands!"

      God chooses to create this world and maintain it in being. Such a choice is radically contingent, as the world need need exist. As such, it cannot be identified with the necessary Being of God.

      Jeff Brower, in a recent article at https://philarchive.org/archive/BROSAAv1 , defends the view that God's making something of His own volition simply means being the agent cause of its existence, and he also suggests (on pages 29-31) that God causes the our choices by determining them, just as He causes things to exist by making them the way they are. Brower thinks that compatibilism safeguards God from being dependent on anything outside Himself for His knowledge of the world.

      For my part, I think Thomists have a "dependency-phobia" when it comes to God. I see no problem with saying that God's beliefs about the contingent choices made by His rational creatures depend on those creatures, because I see no problem with saying that God's essence is absolutely simple, while His contingent mental operations (e.g. His choices and His beliefs about the actions of free agents) are not. But in any case, no matter what your perspective, there's no denying the fact that God's agent causation is logically prior to our choices, and that IF God knows what's happening in the world just as an author knows the actions of the characters in his book, then it makes no sense for God to find fault with us, for the characters cannot resist the will of their author. Cheers.

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    14. Vincent,

      I will divide my comment into two parts:

      (1) I deny that God must engage in any action that is prior to the universe in order to create the universe. This is the position that Brower and others defend. His chart on page 26 is helpful.

      This is not to say that God does not voluntarily create the universe. It is simply to say that there is no additional act of will which in turn causes the universe. Therefore, one could say that the universe itself is an "act of will" (in a sense), preserving the intuition that voluntary actions require "acts of will." On the other hand, if this thought is strange, you may prefer to nix the "act of will" entirely and instead say that the fact that the universe is caused by a rational agent in virtue of its desirability is sufficient for it being brought about voluntarily. I think each option is in fact plausible and defensible.

      (2) As for compatiblism, Brower should not be a compatibilist based on what he argues in that paper. He of course can maintain that God causes our choices, but since he denies there is an intermediary between God and creation, he should deny that God causing our choices entails that he determines them. This is in fact the position defended by W Matthews Grant in a number of papers.

      The view that God causes our choices without determining them makes sense in light of Brower's model of divine causality and the associated doctrine of divine simplicity. I think it is entirely reasonable to say that if God causes our choices, they can also be non-determined. Whether or not this is sufficient for a robust conception of free will is a separate issue. Moreover, whether or not this is compatible with divine goodness (in light of sin, etc.) is also a separate issue.

      I agree that Thomists sometimes have a dependency phobia. But I think the best way to get out of this phobia is to admit that God's actions pertaining to creation are not identical with God, something that traditional Thomistic language was uncomfortable with.

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    15. Also there is no Thomism simply put. Eleonore Stump argues in for libertarian free will and divine simplicity, eternality and impassibility in her 2003 book. Another Thomist who defends something similar is Mark Spencer. It's true that one tradition in Thomistic thought that includes Garigou Lagrange is theological deterministic but there are other Thomistic schools which reject this.

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    16. Hi Tom,

      You maintain that there is no additional Divine act of will which in turn causes the universe, and you suggest that the fact that the universe is caused by a rational agent [God] in virtue of its desirability is sufficient for it being brought about voluntarily.

      But if [efficient] causation is not an action, then (a) there is nothing to warrant ascribing an effect to this agent rather than that one, which vitiates the entire notion of agency; (b) even worse, there is nothing ascribing the effect to any cause at all: we might as well say that it "just happens," without a cause.

      You'll notice that I bracketed the word "efficient" before causality, in my foregoing analysis. You may endeavor to escape the force of the foregoing objections by arguing that God is the final cause of the world, without being its efficient cause. This would be more logical , as an efficient cause is defined as that which brings about an effect, and if there is no act of "bringing about," then we can no longer speak of God as an efficient cause. You suggested above that the universe is caused by virtue of its being desirable. But this raises the same problems as the efficient causal account does. To desire something (or want it) is to perform some act of "desiring." In the absence of such an act, nothing remains of the notion of desire. So it seems to me that by denying acts of will or choice to God, what you end up with is atheism.

      In any case, I don't think that's what Brower is saying, because on page 29, he writes that "what God depends on for his knowledge that human beings exist is not anything distinct from himself (namely, human beings themselves), but only his own free acts of will or choice" (emphasis mine). So it seems to me that your position goes beyond Brower's. On the other hand, Brower also says on page 26 that "there are no distinct volitions (or for that matter, any distinct intrinsic features whatsoever) in virtue of which A causes its effects," so I'm not sure his position is a coherent one. In any case, Brower's World 1 vs. World 2 comparison is too limited: what he needs to compare is World 1 vs. no world at all, because it's agreed by Jews, Christians and Muslims that God need not have created anything at all. Brower would then be committed to saying that God causes the world to be without performing any volitions distinct from Himself. And that, I have to say, is absurd. God Himself is Necessary Being. And necessity, in and of itself, cannot explain the existence of something contingent.

      I'm reminded of Germain Grisez's 1975 book, Beyond the New Theism, which influenced my thinking when I came across it in 1981. Grisez used the letter C to denote the totality of contingent states of affairs, which is grounded in a necessary cause D (Deus, if you like), but Grisez also insisted that the cause of C is not D as such, but Dc (Deus creator, if you like). It seems that you're trying to say that the cause of contingent reality is just D. And that, I have to say, makes no sense.

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    17. Vincent,

      (1) You say that my model of divine causality (God-->Universe) implies that we have no reason to say that the universe is caused by God rather than some other cause or no cause at all. But I do not see how your model (God-->Volition-->Universe) solves this problem. In your model, God is the cause of the universe indirectly via the intermediary, a divine volition. But what reason do we have for saying that the universe is caused by said volition rather than some other cause or no cause at all? The problem is that your model of divine causality just changes the locus of causality between God and the universe, it does not somehow provide a metaphysical account for why a certain cause ought to be ascribed to an effect.

      (2) Two points re "desirable." First of all, I did not say that it was sufficient for an act to be voluntary that it be caused by a rational agent in virtue of its desirability. I said that this was one route for the proponent of this model of divine action to take. Another possible route was to identify creation with God's act of will.

      Second, even if we do go with the first option and do not reduce creation to an act of divine will, it does not mean that God has to perform some additional act of 'desiring' in order to create the world. Here is why: to say that the universe is desirable is a necessary truth. Other, non-actual worlds are desirable. Therefore, the act by which God knows and appreciates the desirability of all worlds is a necessary act and it is identical with God. This is not particularly strange. I can recognize plenty of things as desirable despite not choosing to pursue them (e.g. a pancake breakfast this morning). So we can maintain that God does perform an act of desiring, so long as we distinguish that act from an act of choosing or willing this particular world to exist. The former act is necessary and identical with the divine nature, the latter is contingent and we should either deny that it exists altogether or identify it with the universe itself.

      (3) I think what Brower says on page 29 contradicts the rest of what he is trying to argue. What he should say instead is that God does depend for his knowledge on creatures, but this is not problematic since his knowledge is not intrinsic to him or identical with him. I believe W Matthews Grant explicitly clarifies this point (defending basically the same model of divine causality that Brower does) in his Faith and Philosophy Article "Extrinsic Models of Divine Cognition"

      (4) You say that Brower's position is "absurd." If you mean it is "metaphysically impossible" then maybe. I would disagree with you but I think you can make the argument that you are correct. However, if you mean "obviously false" then I would disagree. There are many in the literature who defend such a model and they do so from a variety of different angles and for different reasons. That alone I think suffices to show that the view is at least not obviously false or "absurd" in that sense.

      (5) But the problem with what Grisez is saying is that what is the cause of Dc? Or put another way, what is the cause of D having the property of Dc? Is it D? if that is the case, then D (a necessary being) is the direct cause of a contingent state of affairs (Dc) which seems to be the exact thing you are trying to avoid. If you say that D is the cause of Dc by some further volitional act, call it Dcc, then we have just pushed the problem back a stage and could very well go on forever with further "acts" of volition connecting God with a contingent state of affairs.

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    18. One more thing: I would not argue that this account of divine causality implies that God causes our choices. While I used it to defend the possibility of God causing our choices without determining them, I would not say that it entails any such things. One can consistently hold to the view that God causes our universe directly without a prior act of will while also maintaining our choices are not caused by God.

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    19. Do you have a link to that paper by Grant? Spencer seems to take a different route. As does Stump

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    20. Aristotle's Jedi
      https://www.pdcnet.org/faithphil/content/faithphil_2012_0029_0003_0254_0274 here is the article. Unfortunately it is behind a paywall.

      Mark Spencer and Matthews Grant have a paper together discussing different ways in which Thomists deal with the issue here: https://philpapers.org/rec/GRAAIA-4

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    21. Hi Tom,

      Thanks for your response. I'll try to keep this brief. Re Grisez's suggestion, you ask: what is the cause of Dc, or of D having the property c? If you mean efficient cause, then I see no need for one. That does not make God's choice random or unintelligible, as some critics of libertarian free will commonly allege: what matters here is that the universe is choiceworthy, as Paul Herrick argues in his online essay, "Job Opening: Creator of the Universe--A Reply to Keith Parsons." See sections 15 and 16 especially. (By the way, it is a myth, perpetuated by Gilbert Ryle and his acolytes, that a voluntary act requires a voluntary act as its cause. All it requires is a rational agent whose choices are not determined.)

      Re absurdity: one thing I object to in Brower's model is that he seems to hold that God knows that p (where p describes some voluntary choice made by one of His creatures) and not q (an alternative choice that could have been made), by virtue of His causal relationship to p, despite the fact that the relationship is identical to that which would obtain had the agent chosen q. If knowledge requires justification, and if the justification is the same whether p or q holds, then God has no grounds for knowing that p and not q was chosen.

      I'm interested in your suggestion that God does depend for his knowledge on creatures, but this is not problematic since his knowledge is not intrinsic to him or identical with him. I had a look at an online article by W. Matthews Grant at https://place.asburyseminary.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2173&context=faithandphilosophy . Matthews puts forward three models, the most minimal of which is the Belief Model. One of its postulates is that God essentially believes all true propositions. I find this unintelligible, as there are many true propositions which are contingent, whereas God's nature is necessary.

      Re aseity, I agree with Grants point that it is sufficient for aseity that God not depend on anything else for what he is intrinsically. But I cannot for the life of me construe a choice (e.g. God's choice to create a world) as anything other than a mental act. Given that God's knowledge that there is a world depends on His having made such a choice, it seems we are back at square one again.

      Re your proposal that God's choice to create the world we live in is identical with the world itself, that would seem to be at odds with the Aristotelian-Thomistic claim that choices (like acts of the understanding) are immaterial acts. For if the universe is not material, nothing is.

      Cheers.

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    22. I think it's important to breathe and take a simple look at things. When it is said that God is like the author of a book, it is an analogy, yet one with limits (God is God, after all). Yes, any character in an actual book doesn't really have free will because he or she is fictional. Fictional characters aren't really evil or good or bold or noble, etc., because they are not real. However, (at least in most stories), the characters seem to have free will and choices and character within said story. It is impossible for that which does not exist to meet its "author", yet in some way those who are in Heaven really do experience God's presence, for they (and we) really do exist, much like we really do have free will.
      Don't take an analogy beyond its purpose.

      God willed to create indeed.

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    23. Vincent,

      Regarding D-Dc, whatever explanation you would give for D bringing about a state of affairs in which Dc, I think can also be given for God bringing it about that the universe exists. We can call this explanation "causation" or something else, but that is just a semantics issue. See I would 100% agree that it is a myth that a voluntary act requires a voluntary act as its cause. But if that is the case, then it follows that an agent can bring about a state of affairs voluntarily without some prior act of will. But in that case, it is perfectly intelligible to say that God voluntarily created the universe, without invoking some further, prior, act of will.

      Regarding Brower's model: the causal relationship that obtains between God and p and God and q are not the same. They are the same intrinsic to God but they are not the same full stop since the difference between p and q grounds the difference in the two relationships. You can of course argue that this difference is not sufficient to ground the difference in God's knowledge of p vs his knowledge of q. But to avoid begging the question, you would need an argument in support of this thesis. It is not enough to merely point out that God is intrinsically the same whether or not he knows p or q.

      I don't know how Thomists would feel about everything I am saying. But regardless, one can agree with Thomists on certain principles (e.g. that God is not really related to his effects) while also disagreeing with the traditional implications those Thomists saw in said principles.

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    24. Hi Anon,

      The whole point of the author-book analogy was to explain how (a) God could know our choices without having to depend on creatures for such information (Divine aseity) and (b) how creatures could still be said to be free. But in the end, the analogy explains neither.

      An author knows what his characters choose to do by knowing his own mental acts as the author of the plot, which he himself has composed. But Thomists deny that there is any plot: they deny that God performs any mental act in creating us. Fine; but without a plot or an act of composing one, introspection won't help the author know what the characters are up to. The analogy fails.

      And while characters in the plot could be said to be free vis-a-vis each other, they are not free vis-a-vis the author, for they cannot resist his will. God, on the other hand, is said to blame and to punish sinners who resist his will. Once again, the analogy fails.

      Anthony Flew coined an apt term for an analogy like this one: it dies the death of a thousand qualifications.

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    25. Hi Tom,

      You write: "I would 100% agree that it is a myth that a voluntary act requires a voluntary act as its cause. But if that is the case, then it follows that an agent can bring about a state of affairs voluntarily without some prior act of will. But in that case, it is perfectly intelligible to say that God voluntarily created the universe, without invoking some further, prior, act of will."

      I agree that a voluntary act (such as an act of will) does not require a voluntary act as its cause, but I do insist that a voluntary effect (such as the world which God has made) requires an act of bringing it about. Otherwise nothing remains of the notion of an efficient cause: one might as well say that God is merely the final cause of the cosmos. Such a position is quite different to the Christian view of God as Creator of heaven and earth.

      Regarding Brower's model: suppose J.K. Rowling were to tell you that she knows herself as the author of Harry Potter and not Wuthering Heights, but at the same time adamantly denies that she ever had a plot in her head when composing Harry Potter, or that she did anything different when writing Harry Potter from what she would have done when writing Wuthering Heights. I think an incredulous stare and a look of complete puzzlement would be the only appropriate reaction. Don't you?

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    26. @Vincent,

      (1) Your response requires a distinction between voluntary effects acts.
      I would submit that there is no way to consistently distinguish between the two in such a way that is robust enough to actually counter mine and Brower's view but also does not beg the question. So how do you distinguish between voluntary acts and voluntary effects?

      If you say that effects are caused by acts, then you beg the question since in that case, I would not call the universe a voluntary effect at all.

      I know this is somewhat of a semantics issue, but I see voluntary acts as a species of voluntary effects (in fact, as the paradigmatic case of voluntary effects). Put another way, Dc is, in my view, a voluntary effect since it is a state of affairs freely brought about by God.

      The other issue with your first paragraph is how you may define "efficient cause." I see agents as efficient causes of their intentions. You may disagree. You claim that mine and Brower's view renders it unintelligible to say God is the efficient cause of the world. My challenge to you is to define efficient cause in such a way that (i) does in fact show that our model of divine causality is incompatible with the view that God efficiently causes the world and (ii) is not ad hoc, but independently plausible.

      (2) Regarding your author analogy: I am not speaking for other proponents of this model of divine causality here, but I have not claimed that God would have done nothing different when creating this world than what he would have done had he created another world. I have claimed that God would have nothing different prior to the existence of this world. But this is an important distinction. First of all, I have allowed for the possibility that we identify the world with a divine action itself. Second of all, even if we do not make this identity claim, I have always argued that God explains the world in the same way (more or less) that you and many others think God explains his own intentions/actions to create the world. To go back to the symbols from earlier, God explains the world the way Grisez thinks D explains Dc (you may think this isn't efficient causality, but then refer to the above).

      Since we both agree that voluntary acts do not require voluntary acts as causes, then we agree that, even on your understanding of divine activity, God would have "done nothing different" prior to his willing to create the world even if he had created a different world or none at all. But this is exactly what I am arguing, the only difference is that I think the thing directly brought about by God is the world whereas you think it is a divine intention or state of affairs in which God is willing to create.

      Finally, as I say above, I do not agree with your objection to my view based on your analogy since I deny that God wouldn't have been doing anything different had he not created the world. But I do want to point out that the author analogy actually plays into my view more than yours. If we think of the Harry Potter story as that which is in JK Rowling's imagination (i.e. distinct from a novel written on paper), then it is true to say that it is not a result of something JK Rowling does. There is no action by which she says "and now let Harry cast a spell." She simply decides that the story should be that way, and the decision itself is the story.

      Granted, this is only an analogy and human authors can change stories since they are fictional. But this is not essential to the analogy. What matters here is that the story just is what the author imagines it to be, there is not some first act of imagining the story which in turn causes there to be a story. Likewise, creation just is what God voluntarily brings about. There is not some first act which he engages in which subsequently causes the world to exist.

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    27. Hi Tom,

      Thanks for your response. Very briefly: I define an efficient cause of X as something whose action explains the being (or coming to be) of X. I define the final cause of X as the goal of X.

      God is (we agree) the efficient cause of the cosmos: He is the Creator of heaven and earth. His creative act explains the existence (and coming into existence) of the cosmos.

      I define the voluntary effect of an agent A as anything for which the efficient cause is a voluntary mental act of A, and I define a voluntary act as an act performed immediately by A, when reasoning (or deliberating) about the achievement of some goal.

      Re stories: I agree that in the creation of a story, there is not some first act of imagining the story which in turn causes there to be a story. But as I understand it, you deny that God performs any mental act in creating us, which I find puzzling, given that you liken Him to an author. And if you were to simply equate humans with mental acts of God, what becomes of the notion of sin?

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    28. Vincent

      (1) You define efficient cause in such a way that requires the existence of an act separate from the effect, but this definition is question begging since it assumes the truth of your conclusion, namely, that mine and Brower's view is incompatible with the thesis that God causes the world as an efficient cause.

      As you know, begging the question does not show that you are wrong, but it is hardly convincing since I see no reason to accept your definition of efficient cause. More importantly, lets suppose that I concede your definition. Then it follows that God is not the efficient cause of the world on the model of divine action that I have been defending. But so what? Traditional theological language has used the term "efficient cause" to describe God's relationship to the world. But this is a semantics issue since my view is still that God is the explanation for the world even though he is not the explanation as an efficient cause, according to one particular definition of "efficient cause."

      Building off of this point, while I agree that God explains the existence of the cosmos, I deny that God's act explains the existence of the cosmos since I have said that God's act is not prior to the cosmos.

      (2) I do not deny that God performs some act in creating us. I deny that he performs an act that is prior to the world. As I have said, I think God explains the existence of the world in the same way that you think he explains the existence of his intentions. But I would assume that you think when God forms an intention, he is performing an act, even though you would deny (correctly in my view) that he must engage in some other voluntary act prior to forming his intention, in order to form his intention. Likewise, I think God performs an action while creating the universe even though i would deny that he must engage in some other voluntary action prior to the existence of the world which in turn explains the world.

      Does this mean that creation just is an intention (voluntary act, etc.) of God? Maybe.I am not committed to that claim, I leave it as a possibility.

      Creation is the direct result of a rational being and it exists in virtue of its desirable properties. If this is sufficient for something being an intention of an agent, then yes, the universe is an agent. That much I have conceded in the above comments. However, I think this is a relatively benign claim and does not entail anything unorthodox.

      (3) You ask what becomes of sin if humans are acts of God. I would say that it carries with it all sorts of potential problems and issues. It does not however carry with it any additional problems than the ones that theological compatibilism would otherwise carry with it however.

      I should again note (I pointed this out above) that my view of divine causality does not require that we see human choices as caused by God. It merely gives us the resources to say that God causes our choices without determining them.

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    29. Hi Tom,

      I'll sign off here, I think. I'll keep my comments very brief.

      1. My definition of efficient cause as involving some act is not question-begging; it's standard. Any textbook of Scholastic textbook says pretty much the same thing: an efficient cause is a cause which produces or brings about some state of affairs, whereas a final cause is the goal of that state of affairs. Producing or bringing about is a "doing" word: it involves an act.

      2. Yes, I think your position does entail that the world is just an intention of God. I can't see how you could say it's any more real than that. But even if you can live with that, there's still a problem. An intention is still distinct from its Necessary Author. It's contingent: God didn't have to create this world or any other world, so He didn't have to have the specific intention He had, as the Creator of the world we live in.

      3. I agree that theological compatibilism is problematic for the same reason that your account is, and I reject both for that reason.

      4. Finally, I think you were right after all in arguing that Grisez's account doesn't work. If D alone [the Necessary Being] can't explain C (the contingent creation), then it can't explain Dc (God's contingent choice as Creator) either. I now believe it is a mistake to regard God as a Necessary Being. God is neither necessary nor contingent; He is beyond both. The two are mutually exclusive but not mutually exhaustive. What is necessary has to be the way it is; what is contingent doesn't have to be the way it is. Both are defined, however, with respect to rules or norms. God, as Author of Creation and as the Ultimate Rule-maker, isn't bound by any of these rules. In other words, Agency is prior to both necessity and contingency. I'll have to think some more about this, but that's the direction in which my metaphysics thoughts are leading me, right now. Cheers.

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    30. Vincent,

      this will be my last comment as well. A few quick points:

      First, I have never said that God engages in no acts. I have only said that he engages in no acts that are prior to the existence of the universe. Just like when God or anyone else forms an intention, I do not deny that they perform an act. I deny that in order to form an intention the agent must first perform some other act of intention forming which in turn produces the intention.

      Many people believe that a necessary God can form a contingent intention without first intending to form an intention. I believe that a necessary God can form a contingent universe without first intending to form a contingent universe.

      Second, I have always affirmed that God brings about the universe. In fact I have clearly stated that he brings it about in the same way that agents bring about intentions (and I have left open whether or not this entails that the universe just is an intention...which btw would not make it unreal). If you define efficient causality to include any instance where an agent brings about a state of affairs, then God is in fact an efficient cause. If you think that this is not a good definition of efficient cause, or that it requires that the agent first engage in some act of "bringing about" before the agent brings about the effect, then you need an argument and it will not suffice to quote a scholastic textbook.

      Now that you claim that God is not a necessary being, a lot of what we could say to one another will not be convincing. I enjoyed the discussion

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  2. Let's say I'm sitting in a chair in a room. I sit for two minutes, with nothing changing as a practical matter (I understand that I metabolized and so forth during that time). A presentist might say my presence in the room two minutes prior doesn't exist, only my presence now. I acknowledge this may be true, but how is it anything but trivial? But beyond that, let's go to the chain of causes you discuss in Five Proofs, the neuron causing the muscle to contract causing you to pick up the pencil. These events are separated by nanoseconds. Yet a presentist would say the neuron firing two nanoseconds ago doesn't exist. How is this in some way either trivial or absurd? Does it solve an actual problem? Or if the neuron firing doesn't solve a problem but Caesar being stabbed does, how do they differ?

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    1. This triviality objection is another much discussed one.See this paper for an overview of responses.

      https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-016-1024-1

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  3. What are your thoughts on so-called closed timelike curves - which are special solutions to some relativity equations which entail the possibility of time travel into the past due to the time-curves linking up with their first state?

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  4. Saying an "Eternel Timeless God doesn't know what time it is now is about as meaningful as saying God can't ride a bike(which he can't and it doesn't make him not omnipotent).

    To ride a bike requires a physical being who sits his butt on the seat and pushes the peddles with his physical appendages. God is not a physical being. Sure God could supernaturally cause a bike to move but it wouldn't be because he physically sat on it and Jesus doesn't count because He would move it with his human nature.

    God doesn know by obervation. God knows by knowing himself and being the cause of things. So saying an Eternal God doesn't know what time it is now is a meaningless objection.

    God can't ride a Bike Either. Thank God.

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    1. This is Nestorian. It is tangential to your comment that it is Nestorian, but I thought I’d inform the other commenters, who might wish to know about this. The claim that “[God can’t ride a bike, and] Jesus doesn’t count because He would move it with his human nature” is equivalent to the claim that “God can’t be born of a woman, and Jesus doesn’t count because he would do so with his human nature”, which is Nestorius’s objection to the “Mother of God” title for Mary.

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    2. The two things you described are not equivalent.

      When we speak of God being born of Mary, we are talking about the identity of the Person being born.

      We would still affirm that Mary does not actually generate Divinity in the same way that the Father generates Divinity, because that would be absurd.

      When OP was talking about riding a bike, he similarly wasn't talking about the identity of the Person riding the bike, but simply the fact that human nature has certain attributes; and Divinity has certain attributes.

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    3. Thiago what Anonymous 2:55 said.

      Let me further clarify. The Divine Nature cannot ride a bike.

      That is more precise than saying God cannot ride a bike.

      The Divine Person of the Word Incarnate can ride a bike via the agency of his human nature. A divine person/relation can become incarnate but the divine nature isn't becoming incarnate otherwise that is the opposite error of monophysitism.

      Jesus does divine acts via his divine nature and human ones via his sacred humanity. For example the human intellect of Jesus isn't omniscient (even if we believe as some theologians do that his human intellect has all infused natural knowledge).
      So I am not being Nestorian at all.

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    4. Hi Son of Ya'Kov,

      I think there's still a problem. Does God grasp the concept of "now"? Yes or no?

      If He does, then He must grasp it in either temporal or atemporal terms. If the former, then His understanding is time-conditioned; if the latter, then "now" can be understood in timeless terms - which is just what Presentism denies. Ed cannot have it both ways.

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    5. That would be a meaningful objection Vincent if God grasped it in either temporal or atemporal terms in the unequivocal way a temperal or atemportal human mind might grasp it.

      The Divine Mind is not unequivocally the same as a human mind only more uber like the neo-theistic Personalist false "god".

      Only the God of Classic Theism is God.

      So in the end it is a meaningless objection to say God(i.e. The Divine Nature) does not know what time it is now.

      The Divine Nature cannot ride a bike either Vincient. See my post way above.

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    6. additional:

      >if the latter, then "now" can be understood in timeless terms - which is just what Presentism denies.

      Rather God can timelessly know "now" because He knows Himself as the Timeless cause of "Now".

      Neither I nor any creature can timelessly know things. We are creatures that change. None of us are pure act.

      Perhaps your argument will have some utility with the followers of Scotus who believe in some unequivocal comparisions between God and Creatures?

      Good luck with that guy. Have fun downunder mate.

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    7. Hi Son of Yakov,

      You write: "God can timelessly know 'now' because He knows Himself as the Timeless cause of 'Now'."

      I'm sorry, but that won't help. Knowing yourself as the timeless cause of X presupposes that you know what an X is. And knowing yourself as the timeless cause of "now" presupposes that you know what "now" means. This is precisely the knowledge that God lacks, if He is beyond time, and if "now" is something basic and irreducible (as presentism maintains).

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    8. Vincent

      Your entire question is predicated on making an unquivocal comparison between God knowing X with a Human knowing X.

      So it's bogus anyway. Like asking "Who created God=Who created the Uncreated".

      >Knowing yourself as the timeless cause of X presupposes that you know what an X is.

      God's self is not equivolent to myself dude.

      >And knowing yourself as the timeless cause of "now" presupposes that you know what "now" means.

      I agree Vincent this is a valid objection to a hypothetical timeless Theistic Personalist "deity" but as you should know by now I am a strong Atheist toward any belief in such a "Deity". I prefer the True God of Abraham and Aquinas to idols.

      >This is precisely the knowledge that God lacks, if He is beyond time, and if "now" is something basic and irreducible (as presentism maintains).

      Rather that would apply to any creature or a being that can be compared unequivocally.

      Saying God does not know what time it is now is like saying the divine nature can't ride a bike.

      God doesn't know the way we know so penalizing God for not knowing something like a Creature who is not in time is like saying God is not omnipotent because the divine nature cannot physically ride a bike.

      Away with your Theistic Personalism Vince.

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    9. Hi Son of Ya'Kov,

      You write that "God can timelessly know 'now' because He knows Himself as the Timeless cause of 'Now'," but you also state: "Saying God does not know what time it is now is like saying the divine nature can't ride a bike." So wouldn't it be more logical for you to simply say that God does not know what time it is now, and leave it at that? Likewise, God does not know what color an apple is, since He is incapable of experiencing qualia.

      But in that case, you are committed to the very odd position that God can cause things which He does not know. Is that what you maintain?

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    10. Vincet, I think you may be missing the parenthetical info Feser put the in the second paragraph.

      I also fail to see why God grasping the concept of "now" would be a contradiction with presentism anyhow; perhaps there are some assumptions of yours unstated here that make it more explicable.

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    11. I don't see why God would need to know each moment as it arises as 'now' in order to know that moment. If He is timeless, then He cannot know any moment as 'now' or 'then', but that us just like saying that God cannot swim, although He causes people to be able to swim.

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    12. >So wouldn't it be more logical for you to simply say that God does not know what time it is now, and leave it at that?

      That would be technically accurate but vague and subject to different interpretations. Some of which are heretical and erronous.

      For example: I can say with Brian Davies God is not Morally Good. But what I mean is God is not morally good in the unequivocal way a virtuous rational creature is morally good. I don't mean God is amoral like a wicked human person might be amoral.

      >Likewise, God does not know what color an apple is, since He is incapable of experiencing qualia.

      Rather he doesn't know it by sense experience. Or he doesn't know it the way we do.

      But given the divine incomprehensibility we can by philosophy know that God knows but we cannot concieve it or imagine how he knows.

      >But in that case, you are committed to the very odd position that God can cause things which He does not know.

      Rather saying He "doesn't know" in this case is trivial and given His nature it is incoherent.

      Like saying God doesn't know what it is like to not exist. Well He doesn't but.....

      >Is that what you maintain?

      No. I think you need to go re-read Brian Davies and get yourself up to speed.

      More Davies less Craig.

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  5. The problem again is that on this proposal it turns out that something non-existent is related to some truth.
    This isn't an instance of begging the question this is revealing a cost of presentism which counts against plausibility of this view.
    So I don't think simply pointing out that presentism doesn't accept it answers the problem.

    To make it more clear. Consider the point made in the post.

    Yes, Caesar’s assassination does not now exist simpliciter (if one insists on talking that way). But it did exist simpliciter at one time, and that is enough for it to bear a causal relation to me.

    The problem is if it doesn't exist now then at the now it can't do anything and can't be related in anyway to anything. So say otherwise is to say that non-existent things can stand in relations causal or otherwise.

    I personally think that other solutions which deny certain truthmaker principle or which try grounding past truths in present ontology are better solutions than this Tensed truthmaker strategy. Or like I said in previous post we should accept that there are some things which are non-existent and argue that this cost is still less compared to benefits of the view.

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    1. "This isn't an instance of begging the question this is revealing a cost of presentism which counts against plausibility of this view."
      But it's still begging the question to say that things that are non-existent being related to a truth is a cost, because that criterion is intrinsically biased against presentism. You can't objectively judge two competing systems (presentism and non-presentism) by a criterion taken from one of them. One might as well say that the fact that, in Aristotelianism, intrinsic teleology exists is a "cost" against it because it goes against the proposition that no intrinsic teleology exists.
      Such a criterion would be biased.

      "The problem is if it doesn't exist now then at the now it can't do anything and can't be related in anyway to anything."
      That's just a restatement of the proposition that if two things relate, they must both exist, only with "at the now" thrown in. It's still begging the question (and also saying that it can't do anything doesn't strengthen it either). That proposition would make sense if you assumed that past things must cause and relate to present things in the same way the present things do, but that would also beg the question against presentism.

      "So [to] say otherwise is to say that non-existent things can stand in relations causal or otherwise."
      Yes. And there's nothing wrong with that.

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    2. But it's still begging the question to say that things that are non-existent being related to a truth is a cost, because that criterion is intrinsically biased against presentism.

      well briefly, that is supposed to be a cost because its very intuitively true, it seems like a Moorean fact.

      From what I've read Presntism that accept this consequence is labeled as Non-Serious or Meinongian Presentism as opposed to serious presentism.

      And well maybe when we do ultimate cost-benefit analysis comparing all versions of presentism and also Eternalism maybe then it would turn out this is actually closest to common-sense.
      But I don't know.

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    3. That yesterday doesn't exist and that it is related to today is the "intuitive" moorean fact against which the pure assertion that all relations must be between things which exist in a mysterious timeless way that no man has access to must contend. Such a view almost certainly derives from situations in tenseless domains like mathematics wherein of course all objects are related to one another in a manner that makes no reference to before or after (though even here it would be inappropriate to say that they all exist "at once": the man doing mathematics is not noting temporal relations at all).

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    4. @iwpoe

      Like I said it can't be bare assertion against presentism because it is what many presentists themselves accept.

      More importantly it is part of what motivates truth-maker principle in the first place.

      And again I am not suggesting its a price that can't be paid. See philosopher Jonathan Tallant on what he calls Nefarious presentism.

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  6. And btw, Does the book address objections raised by some philosophers like Kit Fine or Huw Price that ultimately presentism doesn't really deliver on the promise of common-sense and intuitive picture of time?

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  7. Your blog post is only indirectly caused by Caesar’s assassination. Caesar’s assassination caused someone to record it, which caused someone to read it and teach it to you in school (presumably), which caused a memory of school to be recorded in your mind. This memory, which exists right now, is what caused the examples about Caesar in your blog post. So you can see that at each point, things were only caused by things which were contemporary to themselves, that is, present, and existent.

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  8. Can someone in the comments help me out with the distinction between eternally and aeviternally? Dictionaries do not have the latter, and when they do, they say they’re synonyms.

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    1. There is link in the professor's last article to the part of the Summa that covers it.

      In a nutshell, it says that only God is eternal in the full sense of the word. Other things like angels live in aeviternity. This is similar but has a few differences. It has a beginning and is not entirely changeless.

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  9. Are there more than one A-theories?

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    1. Yes, There are many versions of A-theory. Presentism, Growing-block, Moving-Spotlight, Shrinking-tree, fragmentalism to name some.

      These versions themselves have further versions of themselves. I think I've seen at least half a dozen versions of presentism.

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  10. It's hard to imagine Caesar being assassinated caused much change at all in the world.

    Knowledge of his assassination, however, caused quite a bit of change :)

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  11. As a novice (admittedly, some of the people labeled as "trolls" here have been more quick witted than me, lol)... I have a thought...

    We can be caused to do things based on events that never existed, but that we believe existed.

    Hypothetically, I run various marketing campaigns and measure the results. A co-worker runs the reports and inadvertently switches the labels showing that our Facebook marketing campaigns were more successful than our Google marketing campaigns, even though that was never true or a reality. I then proceed to devote more money to Facebook advertising instead of Google based on an event that never existed.

    If Dr. Feser and Dr. Vallicella had differing beliefs, one believing Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March and the other believing he died last week in a tragic petting zoo accident, this conversation would never get off the ground.

    It seems there are a chain of causes and events that lead to Dr. Feser mentioning Julius Caesar's death in a blog post yesterday.

    It seems ridiculous to assume that the act of Julius Caesar being assassinated must now somehow "exist" in order for the belief to cause anything. In fact, it could be that Julius Caesar did not die on the Ides of March, but was held captive until the next morning and was killed then, and a great conspiracy to fix the date of death to the Ides of March was carried out... if one is skeptical enough (I'm not that much of a skeptic).

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    1. And just to clarify, in the case where a chain of events caused Dr. Feser to mention JC dying on the Ides of March, I'm sure Dr. Vallicella would argue that all of those chains of events also exist, so that even if it were untrue that JC died on that particular day, it is true that reputable historians of the time, and a great many in between then and now, recorded the date of JC's death as the Ides of March.

      To the earlier post related to truthmaking, I firmly believe that we believe things based on a multitude of factors, including the source of the proposition, the impact of the truth of a proposition on our daily lives, and other biases that may or may not be valid. I know that as I was reading this blog post earlier today, I also stared at a yellow pencil on my desk. The pencil is no longer on my desk as I tidied up before going home. I put it in a drawer in my desk with other pencils. I don't need the pencil to still exist somewhere in the past in some vague sense for me to know it is true that I stared at a yellow pencil while reading this blog post three hours ago. I'm relying on my memory and not an undetectable, unprovable extant pencil-on-a-desk somewhere to believe this is a true fact.

      B-theory of time, to me, seems like a severe, perverse interpretation of physics.

      In fact, I think it's fairly easily demonstrable that B-theory of time is rubbish. Something has to exist only in the Present for us to have this experience. While it may be true that I still exist somewhere in the four-dimensional spacetime staring at a yellow pencil, that is not what I'm experiencing now. So it seems something must exist - my conscious awareness - that is moving in relation to all of the alleged "still frames" of my life, and thus A-theory of time is correct with respect to at least some of reality.

      I've never read a good argument for B-theory that doesn't involve waving this experience away as "an illusion" without even bothering to argue for such. It's just a bunch of hand waving and "because Relativity, therefore B-theory". I'm unconvinced.

      But then again, I'm not a philosopher or physicist.

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  12. How do presentists account for motion and change? I'm sure that this is discussed at length somewhere, but could someone provide a synopsis? I'm having a difficult time imagining change in a world where all that exists is a singular point of time. From whence is it moving and to where? On a related note, how long is the present? I don't see how it makes sense as either a point with no length or as a divisible unit.

    -Total Noob

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    1. Things are moving from where they were to where they will be.

      Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVelk9t_Fhc

      You will notice that you can only see the cars in one place at a time.

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    2. You seem to think that the idea is that the past has never existed. No, it used to exist, but now it does not.

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    3. Don't think of time as a point or as a divisible unit, because both of those are spatial metaphors. You can't both believe in presentism and model time as space.

      If you model time as one point that changes, then for it to change, there must be a meta-time it changes through. But that's absurd. On the other hand, if you model time as a divisible unit, with different parts being different times, then you've already conceded the non-presentist position.

      So to imagine presentism, don't imagine time as a thing. Just imagine things changing.

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    4. If you can’t be a presentist and model time as space, then I guess the creep of B-theory into our culture started long before time travel stories: it started when people started using hourglasses.

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    5. Anyway, that was a joke. I can distinguish between a model for a practical purpose and an actual apt metaphor for how time actually works. As an example of a thing changing to imagine, I would suggest the racecars from the video.

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    6. Thanks for responding, but this doesn't seem any clearer to me. If the past and the future do not exist then I don't understand how the dot of the present moves. It sounds like there's no medium within which to go anywhere, no timeline to traverse. It sounds like people are saying that stuff just changes and time just moves, and it can sound to me like it comes close to denying that time is real.

      -Noob

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    7. Time is real, and the way it works is that the present (the real world) becomes something else over time. The past is what the present used to be, and the future is what it is going to be. It doesn’t need to “traverse” a “timeline” to do that. Really, a “line” is a spatial concept and not a time one, as Robert said.

      Take a racecar. It used to be in the beginning of the track. Now it is in the middle of the track. In the future, it will be at the finish line. There need be no “future racecar” at the finish line for the car to “traverse” into it, the car can simply go to the finish line.

      There is no need for the past and future events to be separate things, which also exist, for time to be real. All events exist at some time, but only one at a time.

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    8. Apologies if I'm just being dense, but I think I get why there need not be a future racecar, but it seems to me like there needs to be a future. Does presentism ground a belief that the future will ever actually exist? What is it that keeps time moving and change happening? Why isn't there just a frozen present? Would a presentist think of time as simply change itself? I'm probably missing something very elementary because I can't quite see what's going on.

      -Noob

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  13. On the day Caesar was assassinated countless events occurred. Exceedingly few of those events are known today, nor can they be known. Those events simply no longer exist as far as human beings are concerned. The only events of that day that are known today are those such as the assassination that were preserved in human memory and passed down to others, either orally or in writing. Common sense tells us that the past no longer exists except as it may be preserved in memory initially and that it is the remembrance of the event and not the event itself that presently exists.

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  14. Ed:

    I really don't think an Aristotelian can believe in these facts that you use to get around the grounding objection. An Aristotelian thinks all facts are grounded in what substances and intrinsic accidents exist, but these facts about the past are not grounded in what substances and intrinsic accidents *presently* exists. In fact, for this reason, I think an Aristotelian can't be a presentist.

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    1. I think an Aristotelian can't be a presentist.

      That would come as a surprise to Aristotle, Aquinas, and other Aristotelian presentists.

      An Aristotelian thinks all facts are grounded in what substances and intrinsic accidents exist, but these facts about the past are not grounded in what substances and intrinsic accidents *presently* exists.

      As I keep pointing out, it just begs the question to keep insisting that facts about temporal phenomena have to be grounded in what exists in some timeless way or in a way expressible in tenseless terms. That Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March is all that is needed to make true the proposition that he was. That he and his assassination used to exist suffices to respect the Aristotelian affirmation that facts are grounded in substances and their accidents. For the substance and accidents in this case really did once exist.

      So far, it seems to me that I'm not seeing any response to this from folks around here other than foot-stomping.

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    2. But what are facts? If they are not grounded in presently existing objects (e.g. Caesar's bones) or divine thoughts, are they abstract objects? I don't think it's foot-stomping to ask what a "fact" is. Especially when in its common usage today (such as Plantinga's) they are generally taken to be abstract objects.

      We are not insisting that facts have to be grounded in what exists in a timeless way. I have given the example of Caesar's bones or the particles that previously were part of the knife that assassinated him as instances of presently existing objects that could ground facts. My problem with this is there seem to be some scenarios (like God annihilating the universe) which appear possible but couldn't be made sense of with this understanding of facts, apart from the idea that they are divine thoughts. If anyone here could clarify what exactly facts are - or, if they are some kind of sui generis entity that we cannot reduce to anything, how they are not abstract objects - I'd be grateful.

      Currently, I have no strong position on time. I am actually a presentist, and I first thought about this truthmaker objection on my own, when I was reflecting on the possibility of the universe ceasing to exist or being annihilated. I came up with something similar to the "facts" response, but concluded they'd have to be somehow grounded in divine thoughts.

      Can anyone here help clarify what a fact would be?

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    3. On a presentist view, it seems to me that facts about the past, if they need grounding, can only be made true 'in' the present (which may or may not be different from saying that they are made true by the present, depending on what you mean by the latter); what makes it true that Julius Caesar died is not that Julius Caesar is dying (he is not, since he is long since dead), nor that he is dying at some particular moment in time (which doesn't give us anything about its being the past), but because it is (ex hypothesi) true of how things stand now that Julius Caesar's death is past.

      I actually wonder if the problem is really trying to characterize facts about the past as relations in the modern sense (co-relativity, something 'between' two things); whereas on the presentist view they should probably be seen instead as relatives (a to-something, which just is a stance on the part of something that takes something analogous to an object).

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    4. "But because it is true of how things stand now that Julius Caesar's death is past" right, but what if God annihilates the universe in the next second? There would be no "things standing" to ground the fact that "Julius Caesar's death is past". So it seems nothing could ground facts about the past if God decided to annihilate the universe, since (ex hypothesi) there would be no present after God annihilates everything.

      And if facts do not need any grounding, then what are they? Abstract objects would be the only plausible candidate. But these are supposed to be grounded either in real temporal objects, or the divine mind (or perhaps an angelic mind).

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    5. If God annihilates the universe, there is no more time and therefore Julius Caesar's death cannot be in the past for anything, for the same reason that nothing is temporally present for anything. Thus there is nothing that would be correctly expressed as "Julius Caesar died", which explicitly is in the past tense. All on the presentist view, of course. I'm skeptical of presentism myself, but I don't think this is a serious problem: if you remove the standard by which things are called 'past', namely, the present, it's not surprising that you can no longer correctly say that something is in the past.

      Facts need grounding, in some sense of the term, but your assumptions about what is required for grounding them seem to be non-presentist. To say that it's a 'fact' that Julius Caesar died is literally just to say that Julius Caesar's death is 'done'. And if in the present it's done, it's true because of that to say that Julius Caesar died; the present, talked about in terms of Julius Caesar, is a post-Julius-Caesar time, and everything now is correctly characterized as a post-Julius-Caesar thing.

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    6. Brandon, but what if - following Pruss's example - God annihilates everything except a chicken?

      There are further similar scenarios.

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    7. Then the chicken is a post-Julius-Caesar chicken, ex hypothesi.

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    8. As I keep pointing out, it just begs the question to keep insisting that facts about temporal phenomena have to be grounded in what exists in some timeless way or in a way expressible in tenseless terms.

      I don't know why you keep insisting on that. The Reason why such facts must exist in some way is because propositions can't be made true by something non-existent. Something that did exist but doesn't now is something non-existent given presentism, such a thing can't have causal powers, it can't stand in any relations now including any relation needed for the truth-making work you want it to do. This is the intuition behind the objection and like Bill keeps pointing out its very plausible, so no question is begged here.
      hopefully this makes the objection more clear.

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    9. Here is another way of putting it. On your view it follows that the fact That Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March is still making true the proposition that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March but how can that be given such a fact doesn't exist,How ca n it do anything like making something true?

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    10. Red,

      As I explained in my comment (April 16, 2019 at 1:53 PM), things are actually only ever caused by things in the present, and they can only be said to be caused by things in the past in an indirect sense, which is not as proper.

      Anyway, who told you that non-existent things can’t be the cause of others, stand in relations, &c.? You assume that they can’t, but that is part of what you are trying to prove (the B-theory), and thus you really are begging the question.

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    11. Red, the fact that Caesar was assassinated still exists. What does not exist is Caesar’s assassination, because Caesar is no longer being assassinated. Caesar is done being assassinated, and the event of his assassination does not exist anymore. But that he was assassinated will always be a fact.

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    12. Anyway, who told you that non-existent things can’t be the cause of others, stand in relations, &c.? You assume that they can’t, but that is part of what you are trying to prove (the B-theory), and thus you really are begging the question.

      First, I am not trying to prove B-theory(in fact I think B-theory has even greater problems), just discussing costs of presentism or at least of this particular version.Secondly, even if I was this problem being raised isn't question begging because its not simply assertion of B-theory itself, why do you think its question-begging. And Finally that non-existent things can’t be the cause of others, stand in relations, &c is a pre-philosophical intuition that is very strong. If we accept some kind of PSR or Causal principle I don't see how anything can be caused by non-existence.
      And well I am not saying this is definitely true maybe we should reject this after all maybe its not that counter-intuitive at the end of the day. But this isn't the route that Dr.Feser seems to be taking in addressing the problem.

      Red, the fact that Caesar was assassinated still exists. What does not exist is Caesar’s assassination, because Caesar is no longer being assassinated. Caesar is done being assassinated, and the event of his assassination does not exist anymore. But that he was assassinated will always be a fact.

      Why are you making a distinction between event and fact in this particular case? If fact is just is the truth-maker then in this case the truth maker is this particular event ( or more precisely substances involved in the event.)

      If such an event doesn't exist then fact doesn't either. Otherwise, what do you mean by fact?

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    13. Red,

      The fact that Caesar was assassinated has to be distinguishable from the event of Caesar being assassinated; you can only identify the two if you assume that the tense difference doesn't matter -- which is why Ed keeps complaining about the assumption that really things are grounded in something timeless.

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    14. Red,

      Begging the question means assuming what you are trying to prove. Now, that non-existent things can’t stand in relations is a part of B-theory, and would be rejected by the presentist. As Feser said in the blog post: “the presentist would say that some relations (such as a is earlier than b, and a causes b) require only that the relata did exist at some time, whereas the critic of presentism insists that the relations require something else”. If you’re not trying to prove the B-theory, then I’m sorry I said you were. But if you were trying to prove the B-theory, assuming that non-existent things can’t stand in relations would be begging the question.

      Also, I misspoke when I said non-existent things can cause other things. I’d say they can do so only indirectly, as I explained in my comment, and this only happens when they used to exist in the past.

      Anyway, as Brandon said, the fact that Caesar was assassinated is still a fact. All that it means is that it is true that, in the past, there was this guy named Caesar and he was assassinated. On the Ides of March. This does not require that the event is still out there – the fact that it used to exist suffices.

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    15. @Brandon
      The fact that Caesar was assassinated has to be distinguishable from the event of Caesar being assassinated; you can only identify the two if you assume that the tense difference doesn't matter -- which is why Ed keeps complaining about the assumption that really things are grounded in something timeless.

      That could be true but here is what I am thinking now, if facts and events are really distinct in this case then it seems there is a further relation here , that of facts aboutness to particular event. But then we face a similar problem, how can a fact be about something non-existent?

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    16. @Thiago
      that non-existent things can’t stand in relations is a part of B-theory, and would be rejected by the presentist.

      I didn't know that and that doesn't seem true. I have never seen a B-theory that is just formulated in such a way as to include this proposition. You can say it is consistent with B-theory but that is different from it being part of it. And secondly it isn't the case that this just what is opposite view of presentism. Its just that it seems inconsistent with most versions of presentism.

      Also, I misspoke when I said non-existent things can cause other things. I’d say they can do so only indirectly, as I explained in my comment, and this only happens when they used to exist in the past.
      But then we are at the problem raised by Dr.Pruss. especially see this post below, check objection 2. It presents a more precise statement of the problem with your proposal.

      http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2019/04/aristotelians-shouldnt-be-presentists.html

      And I am sorry if appear to quibble alot here, its just that this whole issue is so very muddled. Just trying to develop a better understanding of the views.

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    17. But then we face a similar problem, how can a fact be about something non-existent?

      I'm not sure I see the problem for the presentist; for instance, on any theory of time it would seem reasonable to talk about the fact that Caesar did not die of old age in bed. And, as Ed says in the post, the presentist position doesn't require that one can't attribute existence to the past in any sense; only that doing it is always qualified (an ampliated use of the term, to use the scholastic terminology) -- i.e., it's perfectly coherent to say that the Colossus of Rhodes does not exist but used to exist or existed, attributing existence to it but qualifying our use of the term by the past tense. You keep wanting the past event to be the primary thing that anchors claims about the past; the presentist insists that the primary thing that anchors such claims is the present's being the way it is.

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    18. I sent and deleted a comment which had misunderstood a sentence in the post.

      Now, I don’t get the point of objection 2 insofar as regards what I was telling you. So what if a substance doesn’t get to affect others before destruction? My point is that the past’s influence on the present can be fully explained by how the present influences the present. There is no need of speaking of Caesar’s assassination causing a blog post, when first it caused someone present there to record it, &c..

      Now, this business of “grounding” facts about the past is not part of what I was explaining to you. There is no need of “grounding” facts about some particle which, trillions of years ago, perished without affecting any other particles. If it is true that such a particle existed, then that fact is “grounded” on that – that it existed. That it is true, and not false, that such a particle used to be there, is what makes it a fact and not a lie.

      But suppose that particle B perished only after one year that passed. Then it is going to be affected by A. And can we explain A’s influences without past events being real? Yes, because A’s gravitational waves still existed in the present.

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    19. The critics of presentism here insist that a proposition cannot be true unless both "terms of the relation" exist. And by "exist" they mean the simple sense of existence that holds for things that exist in the present.

      My father and I have a relation: he is my father, I am his son. I remain his son even though he is dead. I don't say "I used to be his son but I am no longer his son because he is dead." Of course the relation father-son is the correct relationship to understand the correspondence of the terms. That relationship is VALID even though one of the terms doesn't exist. It will still be valid even after I die, and both terms of the relation no longer exist. (It does no good to mention the fact that human beings don't altogether cease in every respect by dying: assume, for this purpose, I could just as well have been referring to the relation of sire to offspring of my dog and its puppy.)

      The point here is that it is NOT TRUE that both terms of a relation must exist "simply" or "in the present" in order for the relation to be real.

      A proposition's truth is a relation between a thing and its representation in the terms of a statement. That relation is a correspondence. Once the thing itself is real (even real "in a sense," such as that of unicorns), the correspondence obtains. The statement "unicorns have horns" is not false because "there are no real unicorns", the statement's truth is satisfied even by reason of only the qualified reality of unicorns "being" a figment of a story-teller's imagination. If a statement like that can be "true", certainly the truth entailed in the dependence of propositions about past contingent things on those things is no less satisfied even though they no longer exist.

      If the relation of my son-ship to my father is valid even though one term has ceased to exist, so too the relation of "true" can be even if the thing(s) to which the proposition refers ceased to exist.

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    20. Red, the fact that Caesar was assassinated still exists. What does not exist is Caesar’s assassination, because Caesar is no longer being assassinated. Caesar is done being assassinated, and the event of his assassination does not exist anymore. But that he was assassinated will always be a fact.

      Going by how Ed Feser was using "fact" in the prior post, this is not a happy way of speaking. The proposition "Caesar was assasinated" IS true, because there was an event of Caesar being assasinated in the past. The past event is the "fact", the proposition is the statement ABOUT the past event.

      When we start using the phrasing of "the fact that X" where X is a proposition, we are no longer using "fact" the way I just laid out. This is a perfectly standard use of "fact", but it is a different sense. This latter phrasing, "the fact that Caesar was assassinated" uses "fact" more in the sense of "a proposition of a definite sort and known to be true as definite" as opposed to "a proposition of an opinion where the opinion need not be 'true' or 'false' definitively because there is no singular answer to 'is it true?' (such as 'the Eagles are a good team'. In this latter sense, "Caesar was assassinated" is a fact, not an opinion, but in the former sense, the FACT is the event of Caesar being assassinated, and the proposition "Caesar was assassinated" is about the fact. In this sense, the fact is no longer a present event, and we would not say "the fact that Caesar was assassinated", we would say rather that the truth of the proposition, "Caesar was assassinated" rests on the fact in 42 BC of Caesar being assassinated.

      The B-theory rejects the position that: [Proposition A - "Caesar was assassinated" is true and Proposition B - "Caesar is being assassinated" is false]. Instead, B-theory requires, in order to represent the reality, a more nuanced pair of expressions: [A' - "Caesar is assassinated in (or 'with respect to') to 42 BC" and B' - "Caesar is not assassinated in 2019"]. It rejects that there is ANY primacy of being about the present at all. All presentism requires is that there be some sort of reality pertaining to the present that does not pertain to the past. It seems silly to suggest that this B-theory object to presentism on the grounds that if the past does not exist in the very same way the present exists, it does not exist in any sense at all, but to me that seems to be what the argument comes down to.

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    21. > The past event is the “fact”, the proposition is the statement ABOUT the past event.

      Now, see, you are talking as if the event still exists, but in some weaker sense than the present does. You seem to have mixed up “A-theory”, which is a broader word meaning any theory which gives some primacy to the present over the past and future, and “presentism”, which as Feser stated in the post, is “claims that within the temporal domain, only present objects and events exist”. According to presentism, the past used to exist (when it was the present), but now it doesn’t anymore. Therefore, I believe I have spoken in a way which is so happy that you can nearly feel its smile, while the way you have spoken is the harder one to square, not with the use made here of “fact”, but with the use made here of “event”.

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    22. @Brandon.

      as Ed says in the post, the presentist position doesn't require that one can't attribute existence to the past in any sense; only that doing it is always qualified

      Well but this seems to contradict they way he first formulated Presentism in the post

      "Presentism is the thesis that only the present exists, and that past and future events and objects do not."

      And in general if you are suggesting that past exits just in a different way then that seems to contradict presentism, it sounds like some Eternalist A-theory.

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    23. No, this completely misses the point. The claim was not that "past exists just in a different way" because 'past exists' is a present-tense statement, and thus on the presentist view is obviously false -- the present exists, the past does not. The past used to exist, or existed; that is, you can attribute existence to it, but only under qualification.

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    24. Ed:

      My argument may beg the question against a non-Aristotelian, but an Aristotelian accepts the priority of substance. On the Aristotelian view, what exists simpliciter are the substances. The substances have accidents, which are grounded in the substances (or supernaturally in the power of God in the case of transsubstantiation). There aren't any entities on an Aristotelian view that are independent of the substances.

      Any entities that are not naturally dependent on presently existing substances (bracketing God's sustenance), must themselves be substances. Thus, it seems, the presentist facts about the past must themselves be substances.

      But that would make for a horrid and un-Aristotelian mess, with new substances--i.e., facts about the past--coming into existence after anything happens.

      Of course, Aristotelianism might turn out to be false. Trenton Merricks, for instance, might turn out to be right that there are truths that are not grounded in what substances and accidents exist. But I don't want to go down that path.

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    25. Tony said,

      The past event is the "fact", the proposition is the statement ABOUT the past event.

      The first part of this is not correct unless we already assuming a nonpresentist account of the past. For most presentists, the fact is not the past event but the past event's being past, which describes a present event. In the present we are still going through the event of Julius Caesar having been assassinated. The fact of "Julius Caesar being assassinated" is not a fact at all for someone like a presentist who believes in inherently tensed facts, for the obvious reason that Julius Caesar is not being assassinated. The fact is his having been assassinated, which is a fact about the world as it stands now.

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    26. No, this completely misses the point. The claim was not that "past exists just in a different way" because 'past exists' is a present-tense statement, and thus on the presentist view is obviously false -- the present exists, the past does not. The past used to exist, or existed; that is, you can attribute existence to it, but only under qualification

      Sorry I don't understand. How is saying it can be attributed existence with qualification different from saying it just exists in some way.

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    27. Ed:

      Looking at your post again, I now think your view may be pretty close to Merricks', and I (and other commenters) may have read too much into your use of "facts". I.e., maybe you don't actually think these "facts" about the past exist. They aren't entities. (For if such entities did exist, they would have to be substances or their accidents.) Rather, your view may be that it is simply true that Caesar was assassinated, not that there *is* an entity, a fact, that grounds this truth.

      If that's your view, then you aren't abandoning the central ontological tenet of Aristotelianism, viz., that all entities are substances or grounded in substances.

      You are, instead, abandoning Aristotle's theory of truth, that truth is grounded in being, or as he put it, that to say the true is to say of what is that it is or of what is not that it is not. This theory of truth is, I guess, less central to Aristotelianism than the ontological tenet above.

      (And of course there is nothing per se wrong with abandoning tenets of Aristotelianism.)

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    28. Red said,

      How is saying it can be attributed existence with qualification different from saying it just exists in some way.

      "X exists" is a present tense claim; for the presentist, unless we are speaking purely figuratively, it can only be true of things that presently exist; it is obviously false to say that the Colossus of Rhodes exists, even if we add 'in a different way'. "X existed" or "X used to exist", on the other hand, although it attributes existence to X, is true, because it qualifies it as past existence. The Colossus of Rhodes does not exist; it existed.

      The problem that some of the critics of Ed's position seem to have is keeping consistently in view that the presentist thinks that tense actually matters: you can't slip back and forth in tenses because if you do, you have equivocated. This is why Ed's complaint is that the critics keep trying to reduce tense to something timeless; that is, the complaint is that the critics keep assuming that tense doesn't actually matter. But when the presentist uses a tense, if he's consistent he really means it -- the Colossus does not exist in any way, shape or form, because that would be to say that presently exists; it existed, it used to exist, it was existing. You are treating the tense as if it is linguistic convenience, to clarify or be less awkward; the presentist treats the tense as much more than a linguistic convenience.

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    29. "X exists" is a present tense claim; for the presentist, unless we are speaking purely figuratively, it can only be true of things that presently exist; it is obviously false to say that the Colossus of Rhodes exists, even if we add 'in a different way'. "X existed" or "X used to exist", on the other hand, although it attributes existence to X, is true, because it qualifies it as past existence. The Colossus of Rhodes does not exist; it existed.

      Right, but then pointing this out simply doesn't seem to accomplish anything because what existed no longer exists but it turns out it is nevertheless standing is a relation or doing something presently, namely making-true the particular proposition.

      Thing is tensed supervenience is still supervenience, and supervenience is a relation.

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    30. Here is just one final point I want to make, central contention of the objection doesn't seem question begging because it is something many presentists accept. Examples can easily be found of presentists or A-theorists who reject this so-called Non-Serious presentism due to its costs.

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    31. Brandon,

      And in virtue of what is that chicken a "post-Caesar" chicken? What accidents in that particular substance "chicken" entail that it is post-Caesar?

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    32. Red,

      it turns out it is nevertheless standing is a relation or doing something presently, namely making-true the particular proposition.

      I addressed this point above in response to Miguel.

      Miguel,

      There is an entire category of accidents called 'when'.

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    33. @Brandon
      This seems to resolve the problem of the really existing truth maker of the assassination of Caesar being grounded in a presently existing accident and substance. However, there is a true proposition that Brutus died after Caesar. Would we then take the find the truth maker grounded in the relation of between the when's of the chicken (this is getting silly) and the event of Brutus' death and Caesar's?
      If that is the case, can we speak of the presently existing when's as relations to all prior events and substance, perhaps leading to an actual infinity of relations?
      Also it seems that 'when' has the character of a relation but possibly without relata existing on both sides of the relation. I thought this was the origin issue with the instance of "genuine relations" in the first place. For instance, being a son necessarily implies a real relation between one man and his father even if his father is no more, or put differently he does not cease to be son of his father because his father does not exist. So, presently existing relata seems also to beg the question with the question of the accidents of 'when' in the first place.

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    34. Would we then take the find the truth maker grounded in the relation of between the when's of the chicken (this is getting silly) and the event of Brutus' death and Caesar's?

      There's nothing particularly silly about it, beyond the initial posit; if the universe consists entirely in a chicken, then the chicken is your universal clock.

      If that is the case, can we speak of the presently existing when's as relations to all prior events and substance, perhaps leading to an actual infinity of relations?

      I don't know why this is supposed to be an issue for the presentist in particular; in the sense that's relevant to ordering by times, everything in the universe is in some way related to everything in its past, on any account of time.

      I'm not sure I follow your thought in the last paragraph.

      Delete
    35. "There's nothing particularly silly about it"
      The silliness of it was more to the absurdity of using a chicken to reference a man's murder than the seriousness of the thought experiment.

      "I don't know why this is supposed to be an issue for the presentist in particular"
      Perhaps not the presentist, but the Aristotelian presentist, because one has an actualized infinity of beings in the relations between the chicken and prior points in time. My understanding of actualized infinities is that they are generally impossible for the Aristotelian.

      "I'm not sure I follow your thought in the last paragraph."

      Rereading Feser's post I see he made the point I was attempting to make: "From the commonsense point of view, and the Aristotelian point of view that systematizes it, causal and other relations don’t require that both relata exist now." I must have missed the "don't require" in my first reading.

      Delete
    36. Perhaps not the presentist, but the Aristotelian presentist, because one has an actualized infinity of beings in the relations between the chicken and prior points in time.

      This would mean it has nothing to do with presentism; it's a problem for Aristotelians regardless of whether they are presentists or not. (I agree that it is something that an Aristotelian would have to look at.) But, of course, nothing has been established about an actualized infinity of relations, even about whether it even has plausibility here; it would require assuming, for instance, that the infinity is not potential -- it could, for instance, be that the primary 'when' accident is such that it is 'divisible' and not 'divided' into after-X's and before-X's, which would make sense on other grounds. Since 'when' comes in just because it addresses the original challenge (that when something is can be attributed to it in the present and yet is relevant to whether it occurs before or after another event), and it would still meet the challenge if one suggested something like that, and there's much less agreement about the sex principia than about the first four categories, it seems an Aristotelian presentist has a lot of room just to posit the features of the accident that would be right for handling the problem.

      Delete
    37. @Brandon,


      What in the world is the sex principia? A discourse on the metaphysics of eroticism?

      Delete
    38. JoeD,

      It's the term for the last six (hence the sex!) of Aristotle's ten categories, which are primarily relevant to things insofar as they change, in contrast to the main four categories (substance, quantity, quality, relation), which are primarily relevant to things insofar as they exist.

      Delete
  15. Here's another question, or two of them. A flash of lightning occurs. Depending on how far away, a viewer hears a clap of thunder more or fewer seconds later than the flash. Are these two events? At the time the person heard the clap, did the flash no longer exist? Related, a star becomes a nova millions of light years away. We on Earth see the nova millions of years after it happened. The nova means the star no longer has existed for millions of years. How do we separate the two events? It seems to me that one issue is how we define an event. Isn't there a risk of creating a Humean granularity between, say, the progress of a brick through the air, succeeded by its contact with a pane of glass, succeeded by the shattering of the glass? Don't we then open the possibility of saying the successive events are unrelated and not ultimately predictable?

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    Replies
    1. Regarding the flash, it depends on whether the flash is the little light particles coming off of the lightning or if it is the event of someone seeing it. The former never really stops existing, though it can lose energy, and someone in some other house might see it after. The latter stops existing, of course, since time passes.

      This Humean business is curbed by the Aristotelian device called teleology.

      Delete
    2. The electrostatic discharge would stop occurring. The photons released and the sound energy released during the discharge will still travel out, but the discharge itself stops. The lightening bold ten minutes ago isn't still sending out additional photons or sound waves...

      The event is the event. Someone seeing or hearing the event is not the event. There seems to be some confusion there. Unless I'm really missing something.

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    3. Can’t the light hitting your eyes be an event? That event stops existing. The event of the lightning hitting the ground also stops existing, by the way. Presentism means that the past is no more.

      What still exists is the photons that didn’t hit your eyes, as you said. I didn’t mean that the lightning kept sending out more light.

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    4. Agreed. It seems fairly obvious it's a separate event caused by the lightning. :) That different observers might not have the light hit their eyes simultaneously doesn't mean that the lightning strike must not have its own Present.

      Delete
  16. Professor Feser, I suspect you'd enjoy reading James Fodor's critique of the tensed theory (including a good discussion and critique of Craig's arguments for the theory, including the relevance of tensed language):

    https://www.amazon.com/Unreasonable-Faith-William-Overstates-Christianity/product-reviews/1912701189/

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  17. OP
    “Presentism is the thesis that only the present exists, and that past and future events and objects do not.”
    “So far, it seems to me that I'm not seeing any response to this from folks around here other than foot-stomping.”
    Indeed, the past is gone, it really did occur, but no longer is. The future really will occur, but is yet to be.

    But what is “the present”? From a human perspective it is a temporospatial amalgam of recent perceptions and imaginations of anticipated near future events. From a mathematical and scientific viewpoint the present is represented as the limit as t goes to zero, somewhat odiously taught as the infinitesimal.

    That was a point discussed at some length in a paper published over 100 years ago and referenced on page 43 of 5 Proofs. In that limit is the meeting between cause and effect, as Russell showed. Cause and effect, like existence itself, is real only in the present moment. The notion of assigning causal roles to whole macro objects acting over time is a human perceptual artifact used as a functional tool to live successfully.

    Perceived causality is necessarily the summation over time of all these, dare I say, infinitesimal causal influences. In mathematics this is done using integral calculus, if one can find a closed form expression to use in the integral.

    In reality causal influences propagate to effects only in the present, the real present, the limit as t goes to zero. A past event or past object cannot propagate a causal influence because it does not now exist. It used to really exist, but that was in the past, and is therefore no longer real right now. A past entity cannot jump over time to cause an effect in the present because a past entity is no longer real, as the OP correctly asserts.

    We can reasonably consider a causal sequence as causal influences propagate and are integrated over time. If we wish to calculate a net causation over some amount of time we can calculate the net change in all the mutually interacting bodies in question, and with some relations the integral solution reduces to a simple algebraic function that allows us to more easily calculate net mutual causation over time, thus Russell’s “there is only the formula”

    Still, in the view that reality exists only in the present, it is useful to be ever cognizant that along with present existence being the only real existence, present mutual causation is also the only real meeting of cause and effect.

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    1. That position suffers from reducing the natural world to a mathematical world. It's a modern Zeno's paradox. *Of course* objects exert causal influence over time. You wrote that post, and it took more than one moment.

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    2. @SP do you have a bibliography of the major proponents of your viewpoint?

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    3. @TC
      "That position suffers from reducing the natural world to a mathematical world. It's a modern Zeno's paradox."
      I agree that mathematics is descriptive of the natural world, not prescriptive of it, and we ought not confuse a logical or mathematical possibility with a physical possibility.

      Such confusions are the flaw in Zeno's paradoxes. Integral calculus, and the concept of an infinite series, solved those flaws and brought our mathematical modeling into harmony with physical reality.

      Zeno made the mistake of analyzing an infinite series from a human perspective. In one’s imagination it takes a finite amount of time to think about each division, and thus an infinite amount of time would be required to complete the infinite series.

      This error was solved in modern times. An infinite series conceptually exists in its entirety in the present moment, requiring no time to traverse.

      Another solution to Zeno's paradoxes is to realize that if 16 seconds are required to go the distance, then at the middle I merely have to go another 8 seconds, at the three fourths mark I simply have 4 seconds to go, and so forth, such that at any particular point my remaining time is just the balance of my total time and there simply is no problem.

      Integral calculus also solves the problem of Zeno's paradoxes by defining the fundamental theorem of calculus as a limit function. This allows us to reconcile the notions of present moment causation with an exact solution to the summation of momentary causal influences applied over some definite time, by solving the associated definite integral.

      Russell has been criticized as engaging in a Zeno’s paradox argument, but that is not the case. Russell was an eminent mathematician, and was well aware of the importance and proper application of the limit function in integral calculus and how that solves Zeno’s paradoxes. He employed those concepts both explicitly and implicitly in his writings on causality, so he was not committing the errors of Zeno.

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    4. @Cogniblog
      “do you have a bibliography of the major proponents of your viewpoint?”
      A good starting point would be the classic paper cited by the OP in his book, 5 Proofs.
      On the Notion of Cause, with Applications to the Free-Will Problem
      http://www.hist-analytic.com/Russellcause.pdf

      Russell argued from a presentist position, so there is more agreement between Russell and Feser than one might suppose.

      In that paper Russell used a moment-by-moment analysis of causation to reject the notion of whole time period of causation as being able to impart a later time period of effect. Rather, Russell describes cause and effect as mutual in the present moment.

      It’s not so much a question of who shares this point of view as to wondering who possibly could not. I invite you to inspect any calculus based undergraduate physics textbook, wherein mechanics, electromagnetism, and gravity are all formulated as mutual interactions in the limit as t goes to zero and integrated over time.

      Presentism is the rational position. One can speculate about many worlds or other realms or time travel and so forth. But the real world we observe is in the present. Rationally, real causality can only be among real entities, which can only be real in the present.

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    5. I did not say it was committing Zeno's error but rather was a modern version of the same fundamental mistake. The restriction of causality to moments is what is impossible and indeed absurd.

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    6. @TC
      “The restriction of causality to moments is what is impossible and indeed absurd.”
      From our human perspective it might seem absurd compared to our every day perceptions. But restricting real causality to the present moment is consequence of presentism, since real causation can only occur between real entities, and the only entities that really exist are those in the present moment.

      The notion that causation occurs in the present moment is also implicit to physics going back to Newton and the application of integral calculus to solve problems of mutual causality. To write dx/dt is to express a change in x during a change in t, with the change in t being defined as the limit as t goes to zero. This is what the fundamental theorem of calculus is telling us.

      You may say that is a mere mathematical contrivance, but you will find that this is how causal interactions are modeled throughout science. Total change is calculated by summing the mutually causal changes of every moment in a particular time period.

      The engineer will instead sum a finite number of stepwise changes each over a finite period of time, using a computer to reduce the time period of each step to such a fine granularity that the final answer of the net change is demonstrably more accurate than the measured parameters employed, and thus the engineer is satisfied to waste no further time on the question.

      The mathematician is somewhat appalled at the engineer’s lack of quest for exact truth, instead setting up a closed form expression for use in an integral calculation by summing over all the moments in the limit as t goes to zero, expressing this by placing dt as the last term in the integral equation.

      Thus, real causation occurs only during dt, the limit as t goes to zero, the present moment.

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    7. Russell argued from a presentist position

      I don't think this is true. In my reading of Philosophy of time he is always cited amongst the B-theorists. Or as I once read a paper by Nathan Oaklander arguing for something he labeled R-theory which he attributed to Russel, it was basically B-theory but with fundamental relations of passage.
      Also the way change and motion are described in Principles of Mathematics seem very B-theoretic .

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    8. No, no, and no. If presentism entails that notion of causation, it is thereby refuted. Mathematical modeling does not produce philosophical conclusions qua model. It yields to natural philosophy, the higher science.

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    9. @TC
      “No, no, and no. If presentism entails that notion of causation, it is thereby refuted. “
      I agree with Feser that real entities only really exist in the present, else there would be an arbitrarily large number of universes piling up, as it were, persisting in their existence at each moment as they become in the past.

      On the rational proposition that the only real entities are present entities how could real causation occur other than between real entities? Can an imaginary object be affected by a real object? Can a real object be affected by an imaginary object?

      A past object was real in the past, and it is reasonable to consider that object as having an effect on another real object, and then another, and another, and so forth through time such that right now a real entity can affect another real entity. In A-T parlance that is called an accidental causal series. It is a temporal causal series in which an entity had a real causal influence in the past but need no longer exist in the present.

      In an accidental causal series the past causal influence is not really itself acting in the present, how could it? The great great great grandfather has long since died, in the classic example provided by A-T authors.

      “Mathematical modeling does not produce philosophical conclusions qua model. It yields to natural philosophy, the higher science.”
      I agree that just because an idea is mathematically possible does not mean it is necessarily physically possible.

      However, mathematical modeling of observed physical processes can be highly informative of the nature of those physical processes. Russell chose the example of gravitation in his 1913 paper “On the Notions of Cause” in which we can visualize that the Newtonian functional relation between two gravitationally interacting masses is highly descriptive of physical reality.

      The masses can only exist in the present and they can only attract each other in the present (although relativity has introduced the requirement for propagation delay, still, it is the propagated local state of the gravitational field that is acting locally in the present moment). To calculate a net change over time we integrate over time, which is a summation of all the changes for all the moments in that time period.

      When else other than the present would a real interaction occur?

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    10. I, you, my dog, the oak tree - all material first substances exist and maintain identity and act causally over time. It takes time for all such substances to perform almost all of their causal actions - throwing a ball, making dinner, walking across the yard, writing a letter, etc. This is true prior to any attempt to model the parts or even moments of causation. It is true prior to any account of time - indeed, it is one of the bases for any account of time.

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    11. @TC
      “I, you, my dog, the oak tree - all material first substances exist and maintain identity and act causally over time. “
      Over how much time, and how consistent is that identity? Is my composition right now precisely the same as my composition an hour ago, or a minute, or a second?

      Material persists over time. Material is conserved. But all material is in motion and continually or continuously changing its spatial relationships to its neighbors.

      Entities do act causally over time, but how much causality over how much time? The net causality of a particular period of time is the sum of the causalities of each division of time.

      Once the causality of a particular division of time is imparted it is in the past and is no longer acting causally, rather, it has become part of, in the parlance of A-T, an accidental causation.

      The further we divide our particular time the more parts there are to be summed but the more additions we perform, so the net causation is unaltered by the granularity of the divisions.

      The smallest division that can be made is the limit as t goes to zero. It is in that moment, the present, where and when, so to speak, cause and effect meet.

      Presentism of existence necessitates presentism of causation.

      “It takes time for all such substances to perform almost all of their causal actions - throwing a ball, making dinner, walking across the yard, writing a letter, etc.”
      Indeed, each of those activities takes a particular amount of time, during which all their moment to moment causations integrate.

      “This is true prior to any attempt to model the parts or even moments of causation. It is true prior to any account of time - indeed, it is one of the bases for any account of time.”
      Agreed. The real world, the material existence, was progressing in this manner long before there were brains developed enough to analytically contemplate causality.

      Indeed, our accounting is based on observation of naturalistic material progressions, not the other way around.

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    12. Dividing an action into such parts and then saying the causation is thereby divvied up, and that it is an accidental series of causation - this is the root of the problem. It is reductionistic, hence my earlier comparison of it to Zeno. I deny the dot-to-dot or domino-effect reduction of causality: it may provide some benefits as a model but you are making it the touchstone for an account of causation, thereby making the tool the master.

      You misunderstand what I mean by prior, and this misunderstanding reflects the same root problem. I mean prior in the order of scientific knowledge and in the order of reality, not chronologically, as you take it.

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    13. @TC
      “Dividing an action into such parts and then saying the causation is thereby divvied up, and that it is an accidental series of causation - this is the root of the problem. It is reductionistic,”
      Aquinas argues from a consideration of hierarchical infinite regress. You can’t get more reductionistic than considering a hierarchical infinite regress. An argument that refuses to go no further than 4 levels of regress is not a convincing argument against an infinite regress.

      “ hence my earlier comparison of it to Zeno.”
      Zeno conflated time consumed by human analysis at each division with the real progression of motion. Modern maths have solved that problem, rendering Zeno’s regressions non-paradoxical.

      “ I deny the dot-to-dot or domino-effect reduction of causality: it may provide some benefits as a model but you are making it the touchstone for an account of causation, thereby making the tool the master.”
      This is not an issue of master or slave or tool or any such thing. This is an issue of thinking deeply and carefully about the progression of reality over time. If you can find particular logical or physical flaws in my descriptions I cordially invite you to specifically formulate and describe them.

      “You misunderstand what I mean by prior, and this misunderstanding reflects the same root problem. I mean prior in the order of scientific knowledge and in the order of reality, not chronologically, as you take it.”
      Reality is prior to our modeling of it, yes, I understand that. That is the rationalist materialist position as well.

      You provided several examples, and perfectly good ones.

      Consider throwing the ball, say, pitching from the stretch. I go through the motions, but just as the ball is about to pass my ear Scotty beams me up to the Starship Enterprise. What happens to the ball?

      Does the ball then cease all forward motion and drop straight down to the ground? Does the ball pass through the strike zone at 95mph? No, it continues on with the kinetic energy already imparted to it but no more, falling to the ground and dribbling toward the plate in the world’s worst pitch ever.

      The causality of the pitching system prior to me disappearing from the field became accidental, that is, I could effectively blink out of existence, yet that causality could not be taken back.

      The anticipated future causality never happened. The ball is just a dumb mass, it has no anticipation of the pitch, it is merely accelerated moment by moment. When I disappear in the middle of the pitch there is no more real causation from me, and the causation that accumulated during the first half of the pitch is not undone.

      At any moment all past causality of the pitch is accidental. Any future causality is not yet real. The only real causality at any moment is the causality of that moment.

      Thus, presentism of existence necessitates presentism of causality.

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    14. Aquinas' consideration of an infinite regress is not relevant here. You're not seeing the point, neither in that regard nor concerning the priority thesis. Read my post again. Causality over time is the self-evident foundation from which scientific knowledge proceeds and without which, or with the rejection of which, science fails to explain reality. This is more than a logical flaw in your description: it's a methodological error wedded to the rejection of scientific first principles.

      A helpful consideration might be the following: do you think that, among merely natural beings, causation of accidental change (in Aristotle's sense of that term) occurs in (or even only in) the moment? And that, thus, motion occurs only in the moment?

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    15. @TC
      “Aquinas' consideration of an infinite regress is not relevant here.”
      It’s fundamental to the A-T view of causation, but we can avoid it for the time being while discussing presentism.

      “You're not seeing the point, neither in that regard nor concerning the priority thesis. Read my post again. Causality over time is the self-evident foundation from which scientific knowledge proceeds and without which, or with the rejection of which, science fails to explain reality.”
      Yes, I understand that. Causality over time is the net causal interaction of the integrated momentary causal interactions. That is how causation is expressed in science. Refer to any calculus based university textbook on mechanics, gravitation, or electromagnetism. Scientific models of such causal systems are modeled by integrating over time and 3space using dt as the last term in the integral expression, which is the limit as t goes to zero.

      I am not somehow undermining how science explains reality, I am explaining how our scientific formulations are implicitly presentist in both existence and causality, as well as mutual in causality.

      “This is more than a logical flaw in your description: it's a methodological error wedded to the rejection of scientific first principles.”
      Sorry, you have not pointed out any scientific first principles I have supposedly violated, quite the opposite.

      There are a gazillion sites available if you search on “integral calculus motion”. Here is just 1 such site. This is how motion is expressed in science:
      https://www.khanacademy.org/math/ap-calculus-ab/ab-applications-of-integration-new/ab-8-2/v/antiderivative-acceleration


      “A helpful consideration might be the following: do you think that, among merely natural beings, causation of accidental change (in Aristotle's sense of that term) occurs in (or even only in) the moment?”
      Yes, as in my example of throwing a ball, at each moment the causal interactions between my body and the ball that have already occurred are now in the past and are, in A-T parlance, accidental, because even if I blink out of existence in mid pitch, the ball will continue to move forward in accordance with kinetic energy already acquired.

      “And that, thus, motion occurs only in the moment?”
      Yes, reality is in the present, at least Feser and I can agree on that, so perhaps there is a ray of hope for the reconciliation of human kind after all.

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    16. I have been at pains to point out the first principles your account violates, namely, methodological principles of natural science and also first principles in its order of explanation. I understand that many modern textbooks formulate such matters in a mathematical way. My point is that this is NOT to present a philosophically sufficient account of causation -- any account that denies causality over time violates a first principle of a SCIENTIFIC explanation ("scientific" in Aristotle's sense, not in the merely "mathematized physics" sense). To deny causality over time is to deny the very experience that we seek to explain through science. You keep saying you understand my point, then you keep re-asserting your position that I am showing to be untenable, viz., that causality is adequately expressed as "the net causal interaction of the integrated momentary causal interactions").

      Your answer to the question about motion in the moment shows the heart of our disagreement. Motion cannot occur in the moment, and thus neither can any agent causality via motion. (Final causality and formal causality are, of course, different; and it should be pointed out that, although they are almost never given a role in scientific textbooks, nevertheless, without them scientific explanation, particularly in biology, is radically incomplete.)

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    17. Integral calculus also solves the problem of Zeno's paradoxes by defining the fundamental theorem of calculus as a limit function.

      The FToC is not a limit function. The integral defined as a Riemann sum is a limit function. But the FToC is not. The FToC is a special case of Stoke's theorem which connects differential forms to global manifold structure.

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    18. (@SP -- Sorry to be curt. Compounding the fact that you've gotten my dander up about mathematics and philosophy is that I've been replying on an ancient kindle whose keyboard is problematic and WiFi signal is weak, so expansive and subtle replies are enormously time-consuming. I'll try to be less gruff going forward.)

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    19. @TC
      “Sorry to be curt.”
      No worries, I hadn’t noticed such, actually, I suppose I have been desensitized and should thank your fellows for that service :-)

      “To deny causality over time is to deny the very experience that we seek to explain through science.”
      Agreed, zero causality occurs in zero time. That’s why the delta t is expressed as a limit as delta t goes to zero. I have been using a sort of shorthand by saying the limit as t goes to zero, by which I meant “t” as the increment of time along the independent axis, expressed in proofs and definitions typically as delta x, x being the generic variable for the independent axis, but in considering change over time we typically use t to represent the independent axis.

      “You keep saying you understand my point, then you keep re-asserting your position that I am showing to be untenable, viz., that causality is adequately expressed as "the net causal interaction of the integrated momentary causal interactions").”
      “Motion cannot occur in the moment,”
      When “moment” is defined:
      the limit as delta t goes to zero
      then yes, motion can and does occur in the moment.

      That is the somewhat amazing (to me at least) thing at the heart of what Leibniz first published and Newton is credited with originating, the calculus.

      Leibniz had his infinitesimal, and Newton his fluxion but there were strong philosophical objections to the notion of a number that was in some sense arbitrarily small but non-zero, yet treated as though it were, in some sense, 1/infinity such that a summation of an infinity of such would yield a precise result in an integration.

      This was solved by defining calculus in terms of the limit function, which is explicit in the definition of the derivative and implicit throughout calculus.
      https://www.math24.net/definition-derivative/

      “Final causality and formal causality are, of course, different;”
      They are both scientific fiction.

      “ and it should be pointed out that, although they are almost never given a role in scientific textbooks,”
      Because they are scientific fiction.

      “ nevertheless, without them scientific explanation, particularly in biology, is radically incomplete.”
      Science does not require Aristotelian fiction to be complete, but that is going off the subject of this thread. Perhaps you would care to advance those points here:
      https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/03/five-proofs-on-radio.html?showComment=1555187608128#c5256587072340591066

      What is “the present” if not “the present moment”? If by “the present” or “the present moment” one means a period of zero time then we can’t solve anything because zero change occurs in zero time.

      Yet, if we choose some particular amount of time, be it a second, a nanosecond, or 10^-100 second, we cannot arrive at an exact solution in a summation, because we have then only approximated a continuous function, a smooth curve, as a series of steps, or a staircase graph.

      That problem was solved by defining calculus in terms of limits. By using the limit as delta t goes to zero we can, in some sense, have our cake and eat it too. We can both arrive at an exact solution and avoid the fact that zero change occurs in zero time.

      Thus, any scientific formulation that employs the symbol “dt” is implicitly formulating presentism.

      I don’t know Feser’s opinions on the various points I have made on this thread but I am quite sure we agree that presentism of existence is the case. From that agreed position I think the definition of “the present” as the limit as delta t goes to zero, and presentism of causation, inevitably follow.

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    20. @Cogniblog
      "The FToC is not a limit function. The integral defined as a Riemann sum is a limit function. But the FToC is not"
      You have accomplished the feat of contradicting yourself in a single paragraph.

      If you don't understand that calculus is based on the limit as opposed to the infinitesimal, well, all I can do is suggest you research the subject, perhaps starting with the links I have provided above.

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    21. If the "moments" that are summed are increments of time within which causation occurs, then there is causality over time. If they are not increments of time but true moments, there is no motive causality over/"during" them. The former is incompatible with presentism but needed for any solution via calculus; the latter is demanded by presentism but makes any solution impossible, as you said. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.

      Final and formal causality are only scientific fictions within science construed as purely mathematical (and even there they are not fictions but rather irrelevant or unknown). The justification for such a kind of science requires appeal to principles prior to that science, i.e., to philosophical principles. And any number of reductio arguments reveal the constriction of science to the mathematical as a myopic, unjustified, and utterly untenable assertion.

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    22. @StardustyPsyche the FToC is a relationship between two limit functions (the derivative and the Riemann integral), not a limit function itself.

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    23. @Cogniblog
      “ the FToC is a relationship between two limit functions (the derivative and the Riemann integral), not a limit function itself.”

      Distinction without a difference.

      Principles of Mathematics
      Bertrand Russell, 1903
      Just as the derivative of a function is the limit of a fraction, so the definite
      integral is the limit of a sum. p334

      308. As in the case of the derivative, there is only one important remark
      to make about this definition. The definite integral involves neither the infinite
      nor the infinitesimal, and is itself not a sum, but only and strictly the limit
      of a sum. All the terms which occur in the sum whose limit is the definite
      integral are finite, and the sum itself is finite. If we were to suppose the limit
      actually attained, it is true, the number of intervals would be infinite, and the
      magnitude of each would be infinitesimal; but in this case, the sum becomes
      meaningless. Thus the sum must not be regarded as actually attaining its
      limit. But this is a respect in which series in general agree. Any series which
      always ascends or always descends and has no last term cannot reach its limit;
      other infinite series may have a term equal to their limit, but if so, this is a
      mere accident. p335

      But, maybe you have other sources or your own analysis, which is fine, a lot has happened in the last 116 years. No single individual is the ultimate authority in science, or mathematics, or philosophy. All such assertions are provisional and subject to later modification or rejection.

      I would be interested to know your understanding of the meaning of dt in the integral from a to b of f(t) dt.

      Also, how do you define “the present” and “the present moment”?

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    24. @TC
      “If the "moments" that are summed are increments of time within which causation occurs, then there is causality over time.”
      Agreed. There are net causalities over various definite time periods.

      “ If they are not increments of time but true moments”
      What is a “true moment”?

      Please provide a mathematical expression of a “true moment”, or at least a very specific and detailed verbal description of it using recognized logical and scientific terms.

      Also, again mathematically or at least using detailed logical and scientific terms, please define “the present” and “the present moment”.

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    25. Moment:time :: point:line. Moments are points in time, as it were: the present is a moment. They are, in the realm of time, that which has no part (to use Euclid's words). But you are missing the point, it appears. If each of the things summed is an increment of time, it is not and never was the pure present but an admixture of present and past, so that causality is occurring, in each, over a period of time, viz., the length of time of the increment.

      Do not forget to respond to my second, and more basic, point.

      Delete
    26. @TC
      “Moment:time :: point:line. Moments are points in time, as it were: the present is a moment. They are, in the realm of time, that which has no part (to use Euclid's words). “
      Ok, so you are using a definition that is different than a dictionary definition of the word “moment”.

      A point is dimensionless. A point is of 0 size in any axis. But I explicitly excluded change in zero time. Zero change occurs in zero time. We agree on that.

      But what is the smallest possible increment of time? Can 2 points in time be consecutive? That lands us right back to the ancient problems, such as Zeno’s paradoxes, based on infinite divisions, “proving” one cannot ever cross the finish line.

      Where do you say that Zeno went wrong? What is your solution to the problem of infinite divisions of time and motion?

      “But you are missing the point, it appears. If each of the things summed is an increment of time, it is not and never was the pure present but an admixture of present and past, so that causality is occurring, in each, over a period of time, viz., the length of time of the increment.”
      In calculus that problem is solved by defining operations in terms of the limit. How do you solve this ancient problem?

      “Do not forget to respond to my second, and more basic, point.”
      The erroneousness of Aristotle’s 4 causes? I am not sure that is on the topic of presentism, and it will take me a bit of time to do the subject justice, but in short, those notions were obsoleted by science centuries ago and thus are absent from modern science.

      Delete
    27. Zeno went wrong in assuming that the potentially infinite is actually infinite. Aristotle pointed this out long ago.

      You are not answering the question. You denied that causes act over time, but then said that what is summed are increments of time. But no increment of time, no matter how small, exists, since only moments, viz., the present, exist. So then causality would only occur in the moment, not in any increment. So which is it?

      Aristotle's four causes were not made obsolete: they were rejected out of hand by those seeking power over nature via mathematizing physics, in much the same way that a foolish blind man denies the existence of colors. Without them, science cannot pretend to give anything like a sufficient account of the material world.

      Delete
    28. I would be interested to know your understanding of the meaning of dt in the integral from a to b of f(t) dt.

      The meaning of dt varies if you are talking about the Riemann integral or the lebesgue integral.

      1. The dt of the Riemann integral is the Δx in this expression

      lim_{n->∞} Σ_{k=1}^n f(a + kΔx)Δx

      where Δx = (b - a)/n

      2. In the lebesgue measure, it is the measure you are multiplying the function with in order to obtain a new measure.

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    29. @TC
      “You denied that causes act over time”
      I have said zero causation occurs over zero time.

      “But no increment of time, no matter how small, exists, since only moments, viz., the present, exist. So then causality would only occur in the moment, not in any increment. So which is it?”
      You neglect at least a 3rd choice I have stated above, as well as a 4th choice I will sate below, making your dichotomy false.

      The 3rd choice is the concept of the limit, alternatively, the concept of the infinitesimal. Leibniz did not define his infinitesimal with sufficient rigor, nor did Newton his fluxions. It has, in fact, required centuries of progress by a number of mathematicians to arrive at a sound basis for continuity and the Calculus. It really is an expansive subject beyond the scope of a combox, but I quite enjoyed this article on the history of the subject
      https://www.iep.utm.edu/zeno-par/

      A 4th alternative is due to the storage, as it were, of causal propagation delay, allowing, in some sense, past and future to coexist.

      A telescope is somewhat whimsically called a time machine. But, we do see things through the telescope as they were in the past, not as they are right now. So, in reality, a past event affects us now, due to propagation delay. A cause in the past will produce its effect in the future due to propagation delay of causal influences.

      Since current theory holds that causal influences can propagate no faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, about 1 foot per nanosecond, the propagation delay of causal influences can be a real physical solution to how presentism can account for causation.

      A time period of causation in the past can result in a time period of effect in the future due to the propagation delay of the causal influence, thereby eliminating the problem of discontinuity between a past time period and a future time period.

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    30. @Cogniblog
      Ok, so you relate dt to delta t as part of a limit expression.

      Thus, dt does not simply equal 0, else all we would ever get out of an integral would be 0.

      But how big is dt, if it is not 0? You included a symbol for the concept of infinity in your limit expression. In this context we are considering going to an infinity of divisions, as opposed to an infinity of extent. How much time is the limit as delta t goes to zero?

      10^-1s is easy to perceive
      10^-6s is imperceptible
      10^-9s is about 1 clock period of your computer
      10^-42s after the big bang first banged we still have no established science

      So, only 2 digits in the exponent and we are already down to almost incomprehensibly short times.

      How about
      10^-100000000000000
      How little time is that?
      Consider
      10^-n where n is a 1 followed by as many zeros as we could fit in the observable universe if each character were fit into a 1mm cube. Did we get to the limit as delta t goes to 0? Nope, not even close.

      Of course, there is no human end to this sort of process. Infinity is a concept, not a number.

      Newton and Leibniz did not provide a rigorous foundation for the Calculus, rather, only some incompletely defined notions of dx, dy, dt, etc. After centuries of further work calculus is generally considered to now be rigorously well founded, but maybe you disagree, and that’s OK if you do.

      So, even if one attempts to cite some particular time period as the minimum needed for cause and effect, it is trivial to provide a counter example that is vastly shorter still.

      Thus, the limit as delta t goes to zero is, in my view, a valid definition of the present, and one that is the foundation of the Calculus, generally considered as rigorously sound mathematically.

      The present is, in some sense, where past and future touch, where cause pushes on effect, as it were. The present is the boundary between past and future and is always moving through time.

      Delete
    31. Your third alternative is the proposal we have been disagreeing about, which I am reducing to one of the two alternatives. Your fourth alternative is no alternative: it doesn't address the question/problem, and it is an attempt to explain the more evident by the less evident. Fundamentally, your unwillingness even to consider causality in non-mechanist terms (i.e., as belonging to living things as agents) makes your account untenable as a general theory of causality.

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  18. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  19. I still have reservations about this presentist position. Can you clarify, Ed, the distinction between the fact that x happened and the proposition "x happened"?
    (By the way, has anyone in the current scholarly debate attended to the medieval treatment of this question, particularly in the Augustinian illuminationist tradition?)

    Travis Cooper

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  20. Stardustypsyche said, "Cause and effect, like existence itself, is real only in the present moment. The notion of assigning causal roles to whole macro objects acting over time is a human perceptual artifact used as a functional tool to live successfully." Aren't we getting really, really close to Hume and Kant here? And we're back to the question of "what is the present?" A lightning strike and a thunderclap are cause and effect that verifiably extend beyond a single instant, and a nova light years away vs its perception on Earth seems like an exception to presentism as well. So how do we define the "present", and how do we define "no longer" exist? Not trying to troll, just trying to clarify.

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    1. @John Bruce
      “ And we're back to the question of "what is the present?"
      Indeed, that is key to understanding presentism. After all, if we don’t define “the present” going on to assert presentism will only lead to speaking past one another.

      So, allow me to refer you back to April 17, 2019 at 9:46 PM where I differentiate between the human perception of the present, which is a sort of running short term history and anticipation perceptual model, and the real present, which is the limit as t goes to zero.

      “A lightning strike and a thunderclap are cause and effect that verifiably extend beyond a single instant,”
      Indeed, they are period of mutual causality over time that we perceive as cause and effect largely because of the difference in propagation speeds of light and sound. During this process vast numbers of charged molecules and particles mutually interact, primarily by the electrostatic force. These interactions lead to emissions of electromagnetic radiation and also to a burst of increased kinetic energy at the molecular level that propagates by myriad collisions in what we model as a traveling pressure wave in the air.

      From our perspective as human beings we perceive a flash and a boom in that order. At the level of real causality something like a billion billion billion entities mutually interacted with each other in a time sequence of mutual causality processes.

      Each real causal interaction, just like each real material entity, really existed in the moment. At each moment all past entities and interactions no longer exist, and all future entities and interactions are yet to exist. Thus, only the present is real

      “ how do we define "no longer" exist? “
      I believe the OP has done some reasonable work to address this over his last couple posts. This seems to be a major sticking point for many folks. Time distant examples are easier to agree on. Cesar no longer exists. We have a great deal of historical evidence that at one time such a man did exist. We can reasonably speak of Cesar as being a part of a temporal causal series up to this day. But he ceased to exist as a person when he died, and the material of his brain dispersed into the environment.

      Delete
    2. How would a nova a million light years away be an exception to Presentism?

      A photon hitting your eye is neither a nova or a lightning strike. It's a separate event. The photon hitting your eye causing you to be able to see the lightning strike was indeed caused by the lightning strike, but it is not the lightning strike.

      Because you are a finding out about a nova a million years after it actually occurred does not prove an exception to Presentism. Information takes time to travel.

      When you first read about Julius Caesar being assassinated in a history book, that doesn't mean that he was literally being assassinated while you were reading the paragraph.

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  21. But if the lightning flash and thunderclap perceived as a single event are "a human perceptual artifact used as a functional tool to live successfully", how does this differ from, say, language? Birds live successfully without it. Humans need it in many situations to survive. We can subdivide the event into photons and sound waves for convenience as well, but this leads back to a conclusion that an event is something we define as we need it for convenience. Sometimes it's two events, sometimes it's not. An astronomer discussing a nova isn't always going to differentiate and explain that of course, the star no longer exists, it's just the spectral measurements I'm using to describe it as it existed then. But we're still potentially at a Humean granularity ascribing causality only for convenience, or at least this is what I'm inferring here. And an "event" in the "present" is also still something that may or may not occur for our convenience only as t approaches zero. So aren't we also approaching tautology here as our definitions expand and contract for convenience? Or if not tautology, triviality? One case, Caesar, can hardly be clearer. But another case, an officer arresting a criminal, may take several minutes, and t approaches zero only as quickly as we perceive and understand from various perspectives what is taking place. And it takes place only from a human understanding, a pigeon observing the proceedings has no opinion on it.

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    1. Julius Caesar is dead. The "assassination" did not happen in a Planck second, it took minutes or hours. However, we define death in a certain way, and it's clear he died. His "assassination" took a period of time, but the event is complete.

      To me, if you propose that somewhere Caesar is still being assassinated and that is as real as me sitting here typing this comment, then you have a large burden of proof to contribute.

      Events take time. Even a lightning strike isn't instantaneous, though it is quick. If you define the end of the strike as the cessation of the release of photons, heat, and sound waves, then the lightning strike has normally ended well before the sound reaches your ears, though not always.

      If you define the event as including all of the reactions that occur as a result of the electrostatic discharge, then you should define your own "end" to the event, otherwise, the effects of a single lightning strike from 4 billion years ago are still causing effects.

      This reminds me of Richard Feynman's claim that philosophers who couldn't differentiate between a steak and the light bouncing off the steak died from hunger. The rest of us were perfectly able to eat.

      If someone thinks that Julius Caesar is still alive somewhere in the 4-d spacetime just prior to his assassination, then it seems that claimant bears the burden of proof to show it so.

      Delete
  22. @Red
    “I don't think this is true (that Russell argued from a presentist position).
    In my reading of Philosophy of time he is always cited amongst the B-theorists. Or as I once read a paper by Nathan Oaklander arguing for something he labeled R-theory which he attributed to Russel, it was basically B-theory but with fundamental relations of passage.
    Also the way change and motion are described in Principles of Mathematics seem very B-theoretic .”
    Ok, thanks for pointing that out, it will take me some time to look into those references.

    The paper I have been citing is the one cited in 5 Proofs,
    On the Notion of Cause, with Applications to the Free-Will Problem
    http://www.hist-analytic.com/Russellcause.pdf
    On page 389 (as shown on the face of the document linked) is the discussion that leads some to say Russell is engaging in a Zeno’s paradox sort of argument, which is only superficially the case. Russell does argue that the earlier period of the “cause” could not influence the “effect”, the logical conclusion of which is that only in the present moment could cause and effect, in some sense, meet.

    On page 395 Russell details the role of differential equations and calculations at instants, denying that there is anything that can be called, in the traditional sense, a cause and an effect, only the mutual interactions acting at each instant.

    Russell at that time, 1913, was arguing to abolish the very terms of cause and effect, since “there is merely a formula”, that is, only the mutuality of interaction through time.

    The mutual interaction he describes acts in the present. In 1913 general relativity had not yet been published, and special relativity was still fairly new so Russell may have modified his positions in the decades to follow. Still, he was advocating for the scientific view of mutual functional interactions and in that view entities interact in the present.

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  23. Unknown says, _If you define the event as including all of the reactions that occur as a result of the electrostatic discharge, then you should define your own "end" to the event, otherwise, the effects of a single lightning strike from 4 billion years ago are still causing effects."

    But aren't we back to convenience, then? I've said nothing can be clearer than that Caesar is no longer being assassinated. Unknown concedes that events take time longer than a Planck instant. But even past events have a profound effect -- take the hypothetical Japanese soldier who held out on a Pacific island for x years until he was informed the war was over. To say that "information takes time to travel" or some such is trivial.

    But some here are arguing now for individuals to define their own ends of events for convenience. We're back to whether a nova exploding millions of years ago vs the astronomer seeing the evidence of the event only now is one event or two, because at least one or two people here are saying it's up to me to make that decision.

    At which point I can self-identify as a phytoplankton, and the discussion is over. Can someone clarify?

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    1. @John Bruce
      “We're back to whether a nova exploding millions of years ago vs the astronomer seeing the evidence of the event only now is one event or two, because at least one or two people here are saying it's up to me to make that decision.”
      Right, if one wishes to assign the title of “event” to a whole collection of time ordered processes, then the definition of the beginning of the event and the end of the event is arbitrary.

      From a human perceptual level we must make such assignments to function. We can’t very well go through life modeling the continuous or continual interactions of every particle in our nearby environment.

      But, under closer analytical examination, the arbitrary delineations of “event”, “cause” and “effect” break down. We find that entities are real only in the present moment, described mathematically as the limit as t goes to zero. Further, since for causation to be real it must be between real entities, real causation too must be restricted to the present moment.

      Presentism of existence necessitates presentism of causation.

      At base then, designation of one entity as cause and another as effect is arbitrary. There is only mutual interaction in the present, often modeled with mathematical equations to express that mutuality, or put more succinctly, “There is only a formula”.

      Delete
    2. How does this differ from Hume, then? For my purposes, I can conveniently assume a brick hitting a pane of glass causes the glass to shatter, but this isn't necessary, presentism makes them separate. How would Prof Feser see this?

      Delete
  24. I truely and deeply HATE Theistic Personalism so very very very much.....

    So much....

    Classic Theism OTOH RULZ! Literally from the Throne in Heaven.

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    1. Are you this immature outside of internet too?

      Delete
    2. Anon.

      I have been here for years who are you then?

      Delete
  25. The Classic Theistic View of God is that He is Eternal and Timeless. Here after to be referred to as God.

    To say God does not know what time it is now is a trivial statement. It’s like saying God cannot make 2+2=5. Or God cannot make Himself cease to Exist then will Himself back into existence. Or that the divine nature cannot ride a bike. So the objection is meaningless. God doesn’t know things by sensing them. God knows things because He knows Himself as the cause of them. Nothing that exists does so without God causing it to exist here and now. God causes the reality of me knowing what time it is now & God causes the existence of here and now. But God is not a creature know what time it is now.
    This unequivocal comparison between the Eternal Knowledge of God and our temporal knowledge is a bit unseemly from a Thomistic perspective and begs the question.

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  26. It seems to me that Ed is impaled on the horns of a tetralemma, in his insistence on the irreducible reality of the present, and also of qualia:

    1. Ed believes that talk about "the present" is basic and irreducible: it cannot be properly expressed in non-temporal terms. Likewise, talk about first-person qualia cannot be expressed in third-person terms.

    2. If talk about X cannot be expressed in terms of Y, then X cannot be understood in terms of Y.

    3. God has a complete understanding of everything, including "the present" and qualia.

    4. God's understanding is in no way time-bound (rather, it is atemporal - hence, no "now") and in no way passive (hence, no qualia).

    I respectfully submit that all four propositions cannot be true. Of course, a classical theist could attempt to salvage their position by denying 3, but that would be a very heavy price to pay: it would mean that there are some things which we understand, but God does not.

    Alternatively, a classical theist might attempt to deny 2, by suggesting that God has a non-verbal understanding of the present and of qualia, in atemporal, apersonal terms. But that would commit Ed to a form of Divine reductionism: the present and qualia are irreducibly real for us, but not for God. To my mind, that's not much different from Einstein's "block universe" view: what Ed would then be saying is that Einstein is right, but only insofar as he is describing God's knowledge. Fine, but that's still reductionistic: it's theological reductionism.

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    1. Vincent Torley

      It is trivial to provide successful rejoinders to each of your 4 defeaters.

      Delete
  27. What has Feser said? Let us get on the same page people.

    Quote:

    Don't "[treat] eternity as if it were some perspective which is simultaneous with all points in time, from which God knows all those points. That is precisely what it is not. That effectively makes it temporal, when the whole point is that it is not temporal.

    Don't "mistakenly modele divine knowledge as a kind of observation by which God learns what is happening in the world. That is not what it is at all, and God doesn't "learn" anything, not successively and not even in a single timeless act."

    Rather, "God knows the world by virtue of knowing himself as its cause. And what he causes is a world in which things happen successively."

    " It doesn't follow that he knows it via some sort of succession of observations or the like."

    "Nor does it follow that he is observing all moments of time at once. He is not observing it at all, any more than an author knows his novel by observing the characters and events in it."

    I would add:
    Stop equivocating between God Knowing and God observing.

    Carry on people.

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    1. Knowing and Observing are distinct. One is passive the other active.

      So, you are wrong Son of Ya'Kov.

      You see but do not observe.

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    2. In case you don't realize it I am Jim the Scott from over at Strange Notions. I see you Rand.

      You have nothing interesting or intelligent to say.

      Delete
  28. Can we all admit both Presentism and Eternalism are ill define and nebulous concepts? They are also often confused with A-Theory and B-theory time as well.


    I find most people who use Eternalism as a stick to deny the existence of the Act/Potency distinction and thus deny change is real, merely are using the term as a place holder for Parmendianism.

    Also claiming Relativity mandates either Eternalism or B-theory is daft as well.

    http://www.arcaneknowledge.org/philtheo/temporal/temporal.htm

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  29. Gale’s Criticism of McTaggart: A-Theory and B-Theory

    http://www.arcaneknowledge.org/philtheo/temporal/temporal2.htm#ch10

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