Abstract

This chapter argues that presentists should reject the existence of (i) time, and (ii) times (including the present time), and (iii) temporal passage, and (iv) metaphysically substantive A-facts—where, roughly speaking, an A-fact is a fact involving some time or event being past, or present, or future. The argument for the claim that presentists should reject the existence of these things is, roughly, that if they say that any of these things exist, they’ll be committed to metaphysically extravagant hypotheses that are better avoided, and they’ll have to give up on physicalism. The version of presentism developed in this chapter—which we can call timeless presentism—is far more ontologically parsimonious and metaphysically lean than other versions of presentism in the literature. Moreover, since timeless presentism involves a rejection of temporal passage and metaphysically substantive A-facts, it also involves a rejection of (standard, metaphysically substantive versions of) the A-theory. This gives us yet another way in which the version of presentism developed in this book is different from standard versions of presentism. Indeed, the standard view is that presentism straightforwardly entails the A-theory.