Palavras-chave
Como Citar
Resumo
The current analytical debate on time is full of attempts to adjudicate from a purely theoretical standpoint among competing temporal ontologies. Little attention has instead been devoted to the existential attitudes -- emotional or ethical -- that may lurk behind, or ensue from, the endorsement of one of them. Some interesting opinions have however been voiced regarding the two most prominent views in the arena, namely eternalism and presentism; it has been said that the former is nourished by a fear of death, or more generally by a desire of preservation for whatever we find precious and valuable, and that the latter is fuelled by a propensity to reap whatever fruits the present brings, as enshrined in the carpe diem motto. This paper explores such a territory by focusing on the reality of past sentience, whether joyful or painful, and on the open future. The first part contrasts the reality of past sentience that comes with eternalism with the denial of this reality that follows from presentism, and argues that from an emotional, or perhaps even moral, standpoint the latter is preferable to the former. The second part clarifies why the eternalist must renounce the open future, whereas presentism is consistent with it, and considers how its rejection or acceptance, as the case may be, could be emotionally, or even morally, significant for our conception of ourselves as free agents. The conclusion offers a tentative proposal regarding which temporal ontology is superior from an existential perspective and some ruminations on the impact that all this may have on the theoretical side of the issue.Referências
ARMSTRONG, D. M. Truth and Truth-makers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004. BARNES, E. and CAMERON, R. “The Open Future: Bivalence, Determinism and Ontology,” Philosophical Studies, 146, pp. 291-309, 2009. ARMSTRONG, D. M. and CAMERON, R. “Back to the Open Future,” Philosophical Perspectives, 25, pp. 1-26, 2011.
BIGELOW, J. “Presentism and Properties,” Philosophical Perspectives, 10, pp. 35-52, 1996.
BOURNE, C. A Future for Presentism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006.
CAMPBELL J. K, M. O’Rourke, and H. Silverstein (eds.), Time and Identity, The Mit Press, Cambridge, pp. 49-77, 2010.
CRISP, T. “Presentism and the Grounding Objection,” Noûs, 41, pp. 90-109, 2007. DIEKEMPER, J. “B-Theory, Fixity and Fatalism,” Noûs, 41, pp. 429-452, 2007.
DORATO, M. Time and reality, CLUEB, Bologna, 1995.
EINSTEIN, A. and BESSO, M. Correspondence, 1903-1955, ed. by P. Speziali, Hermann, Paris, 1972.
HAAPARANTA, L., HINTIKKA, J. Frege Synthesized. Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Co., 1986.
GALE, R. (ed.) The Philosophy of Time, Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1968.
GOLDSCHMIDT T. (ed.), The Puzzle of Existence. Why there is Something Rather than Nothing? , pp. 128-143, Routledge, London, 2013.
KANE, R. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002.
KELLER, S. “Presentism and Truthmaking,” in D. W. Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Volume I, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 83-104, 2004.
LESLIE, J. “A Proof of God’s Reality,” in T. Goldschmidt (ed.)(2013), pp. 128-143.
LOMBARD, L. B. “Time for a Change: A Polemic against the Presentism-Eternalism Debate,” in J. K Campbell, M. O’Rourke, and H. Silverstein (eds.) (2010), pp. 49-77.
LOWE, E. J. Personal Agency, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008.
MACBRIDE, F., “Truthmakers,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2016 Edition), E. N. Zalta (ed.), URL http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/truthmakers/.
MERRICKS, T. Truth and Ontology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007.
OAKLANDER, L. N. “Freedom and the New Theory of Time,” in R. Le Poidevin (ed.) (1998), pp. 185-205.
OAKLANDER, L. N. “Dolev’s Anti-Metaphysical Realism: A Critique,” in L. N. Oaklander (ed.) (2014), pp. 3-29. OAKLANDER, L. N. (ed.) (2014), Debates in the Metaphysics of Time, Bloomsbury, London, pp. 3-29. OAKLANDER, L. N.“Temporal Phenomena, Ontology and the R-theory,” Metaphysica, 16, 253–269, 2015.
ORILIA, F. “Two Metaphysical Perspectives on the Duration of the Present,” in L. N. Oaklander (ed.) (2014), pp. 51-70. ORILIA, F. “The Moral Desirability of Presentism,” presented at the Conference God, Time, Infinity, International Center for Formal Ontology, Warsaw, 22-24 September 2015, forthcoming in M. Szatkowski (ed.), God, Time, Infinity, De Gruyter, Berlin. ORILIA, F. “Moderate Presentism,” Philosophical Studies, 173, pp. 589-607, 2016.
ØHRSTRØM, P. and HASLE, P. “Future Contingents,” in E. Zalta (ed.) (2015), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/future-contingents.
R. LE POIDEVIN (ed.) (1998), Questions of Time and Tense, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 185-205.
PRIOR, A.N. Past, Present and Future, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1967.
REICHENBACH, H. The Direction of Time, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1956.
RUSSELL, B. Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays, G. Allen &Unwin, London, 1917.
SEVERINO, E. La struttura originaria, La Scuola, Brescia, 1958.
VAN FRAASSEN, B. “Singular Terms, Truth-Value Gaps, and Free Logic,” Journal of Philosophy, 63, pp. 481-495, 1966.
VAN HEIJENOORT, J. "Frege on Vagueness". In L. Haaparanta and J. Hintikka (eds.) (1986), pp. 31-45.
ZIMMERMAN D. W. (ed.) Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Volume I, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 83-104, 2004.
Downloads
