There is no such thing as presentism

Jonathan Tallant (Nottingham University)

Abstract: Presentism is very well-known in the literature on the metaphysics of time and the metaphysics of persistence. It has its defenders and its detractors. Or so things seem. My thesis in this paper is that there is, in fact, no such view as presentism. Section 1 introduces one reading of presentism to give us our starting point and briefly outlines my methodology. In section 2 I introduce a range of different ways in which presentism is described. This suffices to show that there is no single view that is presentism (section 2). There is, more importantly, also no common core to these views that marks them as distinctively ‘presentist’ (section 3). Demonstrating that this is so is the main aim of the paper. In section 4 I consider some worries and objections.