Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

Extensionalism is, roughly, the view that perception occurs in episodes that are temporally extended (and thus capable of accomodating in their entirety phenomena taking a nonzero lapse of time to occur). This view is widely acknowledged to be incompatible with thin presentism, the second most popular position in temporal ontology. In this paper, I argue that extensionalism is also incompatible with several other positions in temporal ontology, namely those positing the existence of non-present times that host sentience—positions I collectively refer to as the sentient non-present view. Most notably, extensionalism…

Michael Dummett’s paper “A Defence of McTaggart’s Proof of the Unreality of Time” put forward an ingenious interpretation of McTaggart’s famous proof. My aim in this discussion is not to assess the cogency of McTaggart’s reasoning, but to criticise Dummett’s interpretation of McTaggart.

There are two prominent theses in Bonomi’s 2023 paper “Non-Persistent Truths”, here labelled the two-levels and the changing background theses. According to the former, both semantic eternalism and temporalism are right, in that our ordinary natural language utterances may be taken to express both anchored propositions with a fixed truth value and floating propositions with a changing truth value. According to the changing background thesis, there are future-tensed propositions that change truth value, for reasons that have to do with change in background information available to ordinary speakers, rather than…