Presentism and the Specious Present: From Temporal Experience to Meta-Metaphysics

Abstract

In the debate between presentism and eternalism, presentism is often assumed to be the position that is in line with ordinary intuitions and experience, with eternalism being the counter-intuitive position that must explain these intuitions and appearances away. I argue that this assumption is problematic, in that presentism's supposed agreement with our experience is conditional on the assumption that presentism is correct. In particular, attention to specious present models of temporal experience reveals the possibility of a deep disconnect between presentism and experience—on which presentism fails in accommodating the very intuitions that are supposed to motivate the view. I argue that this complexity in the dialectic suggests that we should see the debate between presentism and eternalism in a new light.