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).