Meyer’s Struggle with Presentism or How We Can Understand the Debate between Presentism and Eternalism

Jerzy Gołosz

doi:10.12775/LLP.2019.018

Authors

Jerzy Gołosz Jagiellonian University, Institute of Philosophy https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2457-9865

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12775/LLP.2019.018

Keywords

presentism, eternalism, tensed theory of time, tenseless theory of time, A-theory of time, B-theory of time, triviality objection, passage of time

Abstract

The paper consists of two parts. The first critically analyses Meyer’s [2005] version of the triviality objection to presentism (according to which, presentism is either trivial or untenable), and tries to show that his argument is untenable because – contrary to what he claimed – he did not take into account the entire possible spectrum of interpretations of the presentist’s thesis. In the second, positive part of the paper, it is shown that a leading form of tensed theory of time postulates the same ontology as presentism and that it avoids the triviality problem which means that it can be used to generate an alternative formulation of presentism which is no longer vulnerable to the triviality objection.

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