Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T10:28:52.145Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Time and Degrees of Existence: A Theory of ‘Degree Presentism’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Craig Callender
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
Get access

Summary

Introduction

It seems intuitively obvious that what I am doing right now is more real than what I did just one second ago, and it seems intuitively obvious that what I did just one second ago is more real than what I did forty years ago. And yet, remarkably, every philosopher of time today, except for the author, denies this obvious fact about reality. What went wrong? How could philosophers get so far away from what is the most experientially evident fact about reality?

The concept of a degree of existence (of being more or less real) went out of fashion with the rise of analytic philosophy early in the 20th century, specifically, with Russell's 1905 article ‘On Denoting’, for in 1904 and earlier years he and G. E. Moore held a sort of Meinongian theory of degrees of existence (subsistence and existence are distinguished, with existence being a higher degree of being than subsistence). Early work by Frege also rejected the notion of degreed existence and implied that existence is an all or nothing affair; either something exists or it does not exist, and it makes no sense to talk about it existing to some degree.

Most (but not all) philosophers from Plato to Meinong have held doctrines of degrees of existence. Unfortunately, however, they also denied this obvious temporal fact about reality, for they explained degrees of reality in other ways than the way we know it (as being more or less distant from the present).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×