What if only the present moment exists, and everything you call the past or the future is, strictly speaking, nothing at all?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Mark Balaguer is professor of philosophy at Cal State LA, and his research has covered a wide range of topics, including metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, free will, and metaethics.

Check out his book, "How to Be a Presentist"!https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-to-be-a-presentist-9780197845714https://a.co/d/009UAUtC

2. Book Summary

Balaguer’s book sets out to develop and defend an original version of presentism — the view in the philosophy of time that only present objects exist, with no past or future objects in the inventory of reality. Crucially, Balaguer is not arguing that presentism is true; his project is the more modest one of showing that presentism is a live, defensible position and that, if there is a fact of the matter at all, the question of its truth is an open empirical one rather than something settleable by armchair metaphysics. The book is organized around three classical objections to presentism: the ontological-commitment objection (that true sentences like “Obama admires Gandhi” seem to require past objects to exist), the truthmaking objection (that truths about the past need something in reality to make them true), and the special-relativity objection (that physics rules out a privileged “now”).

The first part of the book lays metaphilosophical groundwork, arguing against trivialism, against necessitarianism about metaphysics, and in favor of an “anti-metaphysicalist” stance on which presentism, if factual, is a contingent empirical hypothesis rather than something knowable a priori. Part II then mounts the defense proper. Against the ontological-commitment objection, Balaguer endorses a sweeping “FAPP-ist” error theory: the relevant ordinary and scientific sentences about past or future objects are, strictly speaking, false, but they function fine “for all practical purposes.” Against the truthmaking objection, he develops a position he calls nothingism, on which past-tense sentences that presentists count as true don’t have truthmakers because they aren’t really making claims about reality at all. Against special relativity, he constructs a relativized presentism compatible with the relativity of simultaneity, avoiding any appeal to a privileged frame. He also takes on subsidiary worries about time travel and change.

The book’s most distinctive move comes in Part III, where Balaguer pushes presentism toward what he calls metaphysically minimal or timeless presentism. Here he argues — surprisingly, given the near-universal assumption that presentists must endorse the A-theory — that presentists should reject the existence of time itself, of times (including the present time), of temporal passage, and of metaphysically substantive A-facts (facts about something being past, present, or future). On the resulting picture, talk of time is best treated as a useful fiction layered over a more fundamental notion of intrinsic change, yielding a presentism that is ontologically lean, empirically respectable, and stripped of the heavy metaphysical machinery usually thought to come with the view. The overall result is a defense of presentism that is at once more concessive (presentism is not proven, just shielded from refutation) and more radical (presentism without time) than standard treatments in the literature.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introductio

00:57 - Overview of book

02:47 - Substantive dispute

06:31 - Non-factualism

09:15 - Substantialese

13:58 - Understanding the difference

21:40 - Contingent thesis

28:35 - A posteriori identities

41:10 - Scientism

47:55 - Ontological commitment objection

53:39 - Relevance of physics

1:00:25 - FAPP truth

1:05:03 - Truthmakers objection

1:08:19 - Potential reply

1:17:45 - Present truthmakers?

1:19:43 - Abandon physicalism?

1:20:54 - Swamp world

1:22:17 - The actual world and modal realism

1:36:26 - Nothingism

1:38:40 - Claims about reality

1:42:27 - Understanding the claims

1:53:16 - Counterfactuals

2:04:09 - Understanding modality

2:16:53 - Special relativity

2:26:53 - Avoiding anti-realism and eternalism

2:39:43 - Lean view

2:45:19 - What is time?

2:49:43 - William Lane Craig

2:52:06 - Summary of view

2:54:24 - Future work

2:56:08 - Temporal phenomenology

3:01:11 - Value of philosophy

3:03:31 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe