How to Be a Presentist

Presentism is the view that only present objects exist and that there are no past or future objects. In How to Be a Presentist, Mark Balaguer defends presentism against numerous objections, most notably, the ontological-commitment objection, the truthmaking objection, and the special-relativity objection. More specifically, this book argues that (i) presentists can respond to the ontological-commitment objection by endorsing a very general and systematic error theory about much of our ordinary and scientific discourse about the past and future; that (ii) presentists can plausibly and defensibly respond to the truthmaking objection by rejecting the relevant truthmaking principles; and that (iii) presentists can respond to the special-relativity objection not by endorsing the existence of a privileged frame of reference but by relativizing their view.

In addition to defending presentism against objections, Balaguer argues for two other substantive theses. First, he argues for the metaphilosophical (and anti-metaphysical) view that the question of whether presentism is true is an ordinary empirical question about the nature of physical reality and that this question can't be settled by a priori philosophical arguments. Second, Balaguer argues that presentists should reject the existence of time, times (including the present time), and temporal passage. From this it follows that presentists should reject standard versions of the A-theory—which is surprising because it's widely believed that presentism entails the A-theory.

The version of presentism developed in this book is a metaphysically thin, ontologically parsimonious view that can be thought of as an ordinary empirical hypothesis—a profoundly different view from other versions of presentism in the literature.