Abstract This chapter initiates the second part of our investigation; it therefore seems a good idea to recapitulate, very briefly, where we are now and how we got here. Our point of departure in Chap. 1 was the disparity intuition (di), and we have noted that presentism appears best suited to do full justice to it. But any viable form of presentism implies that reality is deeply temporal, featuring temporal compartmentalization as well as temporal dynamicity—without the former, presentism would lack any substance at all, and without the latter, any plausibility. The hypothesis of deep temporality is, then, of key importance for a di-friendly metaphysics of time, and that hypothesis, in turn, seems to require realism about tense. The standard approach to realism is profoundly misguided, however. In Chap. 3, we have examined one crucial difficulty with it: since standard realists single out, in absolute terms, some particular time as the unique locus of constitution for facts, they cannot give a diachronically comprehensive account of a non-instantaneous world that features temporal dynamicity. An even more basic problem with this approach is that it fails to sufficiently distance itself from the anti-realist paradigm: even though it is committed to the thesis that some of the facts that constitute reality are tensed, it agrees with the anti-realist that the constitution of reality by facts in general is to be understood as a temporally absolute matter. But, as we have seen in Chap. 4, the notion of temporally absolute constitution by tensed facts is not a coherent one. Anyone who is sympathetic to the hypothesis of deep temporality should therefore buy the whole temporalist package, which includes, alongside realism, the rejection of an absolutist and atemporalist notion of constitution as well.

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Times as Perspectives: The Foundations of Perspectivalism

  • Bahadir Eker

摘要

Abstract This chapter initiates the second part of our investigation; it therefore seems a good idea to recapitulate, very briefly, where we are now and how we got here. Our point of departure in Chap. 1 was the disparity intuition (di), and we have noted that presentism appears best suited to do full justice to it. But any viable form of presentism implies that reality is deeply temporal, featuring temporal compartmentalization as well as temporal dynamicity—without the former, presentism would lack any substance at all, and without the latter, any plausibility. The hypothesis of deep temporality is, then, of key importance for a di-friendly metaphysics of time, and that hypothesis, in turn, seems to require realism about tense. The standard approach to realism is profoundly misguided, however. In Chap. 3, we have examined one crucial difficulty with it: since standard realists single out, in absolute terms, some particular time as the unique locus of constitution for facts, they cannot give a diachronically comprehensive account of a non-instantaneous world that features temporal dynamicity. An even more basic problem with this approach is that it fails to sufficiently distance itself from the anti-realist paradigm: even though it is committed to the thesis that some of the facts that constitute reality are tensed, it agrees with the anti-realist that the constitution of reality by facts in general is to be understood as a temporally absolute matter. But, as we have seen in Chap. 4, the notion of temporally absolute constitution by tensed facts is not a coherent one. Anyone who is sympathetic to the hypothesis of deep temporality should therefore buy the whole temporalist package, which includes, alongside realism, the rejection of an absolutist and atemporalist notion of constitution as well.