Regarding the famous Sea Battle Argument, which Aristotle presents in De Interpretatione 9, there has never been a general agreement not only about its correctness but also, and mainly, about what the argument really is. According to the most natural reading of the chapter, the argument appeals to a temporal concept of truth and concludes that not every statement is always either true or false. However, many of Aristotle’s followers and commentators have not adopted this reading. I believe (...) that it has faced so much resistance for reasons of hermeneutic charity: denying the law of universal bivalence seems to be overly disruptive to logical orthodoxy – the kind of logical orthodoxy represented by what we now call classical propositional logic, much of which Aristotle clearly supports in many texts. I intend to show that the logical-semantic theses that the traditional reading finds in De Interpretatione 9 are much more conservative than they may seem to be at first glance. First, I will show that they complement, and do not contradict in any way, the orthodox definitions of the concepts of truth and statement that Aristotle advances in other texts. Second, by resorting in an anachronistic vein to concepts and methods peculiar to contemporary logic, I will show that a trivalent modal semantics conforming to those theses can be built for a standard formal language of the classical propositional calculus. It is remarkable that reasonable concepts of logical truth and logical consequence that may be defined on the basis of this trivalent modal semantics are coextensive with their orthodox counterparts, the concepts of tautology and tautological consequence of classical bivalent and extensional semantics. (shrink)

The essay introduces a non-Diodorean, non-Kantian temporal modal semantics based on part-whole, rather than class, theory. Formalizing Edmund Husserl’s theory of inner time consciousness, §3 uses his protention and retention concepts to define a relation of self-awareness on intentional events. §4 introduces a syntax and two-valued semantics for modal first-order predicate object-languages, defines semantic assignments for variables and predicates, and truth for formulae in terms of the axiomatic version of Edmund Husserl’s dependence ontology (viz. the Calculus [CU] of (...) Urelements) introduced by The Ontology of Intentionality I & II. It then uses the §3 results to define the modalities of truth, and §5 extends the semantics to identity claims. §6 defines and contrasts synthetic a priori truths to analytic a priori truths, and §7 compares Brentano School noetic semantic and Leibnizian possible-world semantic perspectives on modality. The essay argues that the modal logics it defines semantically are two-valued, first-order versions of the type of language which Husserl viewed as the language of any ontology of experience (i.e. of any science), and conceived as the logic of intentionality. (shrink)

This paper examines the intersecting of the themes of temporality and truth in Deleuze's philosophy. For the ancients, truth was something eternal: what was true was true in all times and in all places. Temporality (coming to be and passing away) was the realm of the mutable, not the eternal. In the seventeenth century, change began to be seen in a positive light (progress, evolution, and so on), but this change was seen to be possible only because of (...) the immutable laws of nature that govern change. It was not until philosophers such as Bergson, James, Whitehead – and then Deleuze – that time began to be taken seriously on its own account. On the one hand, in Deleuze, time, freed from its subordination to movement, now becomes autonomous: it is the pure form of change (continuous variation) that lies at the basis of Deleuze's metaphysics in Difference and Repetition (and is explored more thematically in The Time-Image). As a result, on the other hand, the false, freed from its subordination to the form of the true, assumes a power of its own (the power of the false), which in turn implies a new ‘analytic of the concept’ that Deleuze develops in What Is Philosophy? (shrink)

Our ordinary conception of time has it that there are temporal particulars: not only do people do things, but there are particular doings by people; not only are we born, but the birth of each one of us was a particular event, and each of us will have our own particular death. Temporal particulars in this sense are individuated, fundamentally, by their temporal locations or relations, rather than by their intrinsic or qualitative characteristics. In this respect they (...) are unrepeatable, not just de facto, but as a matter of their very nature. However, there is a tradition in philosophy that seriously downplays this aspect of our thinking about time. According to this tradition, the fundamental unit of temporal representation is _tensed truth_; the notion of an unrepeatable particular, individuated by its temporal location, is at best an abstraction from a complex of tensed truths. The aims of this paper are, first, to argue that the representation of temporal particulars is deeply implicated in our ordinary conception of the past as fixed and unalterable; and, secondly, to argue that the theorist of tensed truth is able to provide only a pale imitation of this aspect of our thinking. I will then reflect on the consequences of this for debates about the metaphysics of tense. (shrink)

This topical collection is dedicated to the formal representation of arguments involving temporal reasoning and tensed truths; in particular, arguments with a clear significance to everyday life. In a broad perspective, temporal reasoning can be rigorously encoded via intensional logic, treating tenses as modalities, or via extensional logic, quantifying over domains of temporal objects (e.g., instants, intervals, etc.). Nowadays there are several formal devices (languages, systems, semantics, etc.) able to deal with time in many regards. Each of (...) these devices is characterized by peculiar features, such as a certain choice of primitive notions and, arguably, a certain kind of ontological commitment (see, e.g., the surveys of approaches offered by Prior 1967, van Benthem 1983, Gabbay, Hodkinson & Reynolds 1994 and Øhrstrøm & Hasle 1995). The truth-conditions of (the propositions expressed by) statements involving tenses can be explained either in terms of the “past-present-future” opposition (McTaggart’s A-theory) or in terms of the “earlier-later” opposition (McTaggart’s B-theory). Moreover, taking into account the difference between chronologically definite propositions and chronologically indefinite propositions (Rescher 1966), it is possible to distinguish between atemporal and temporal (or tensed) notions of truth. This topical collection will primarily focus on the latter. (shrink)

In the context of truth-functional propositional many-valued logics, Hájek’s Basic Fuzzy Logic BL [14] plays a major rôle. The completeness theorem proved in [7] shows that BL is the logic of all continuous t -norms and their residua. This result, however, does not directly yield any meaningful interpretation of the truth values in BL per se . In an attempt to address this issue, in this paper we introduce a complete temporal semantics for BL. Specifically, we show (...) that BL formulas can be interpreted as modal formulas over a flow of time, where the logic of each instant is Łukasiewicz, with a finite or infinite number of truth values. As a main result, we obtain validity with respect to all flows of times that are non-branching to the future, and completeness with respect to all finite linear flows of time, or to an appropriate single infinite linear flow of time. It may be argued that this reduces the problem of establishing a meaningful interpretation of the truth values in BL logic to the analogous problem for Łukasiewicz logic. (shrink)

In section 1 we argue that the adoption of a tenseless notion of truth entails a realistic view of propositions and provability. This view, in turn, opens the way to the intelligibility of theclassical meaning of the logical constants, and consequently is incompatible with the antirealism of orthodox intuitionism. In section 2 we show how what we call the potential intuitionistic meaning of the logical constants can be defined, on the one hand, by means of the notion of atemporal (...) provability and, on the other, by means of the operator K of epistemic logic. Intuitionistic logic, as reconstructed within this perspective, turns out to be a part of epistemic logic, so that it loses its traditional foundational role, antithetic to that of classical logic. In section 3 we uphold the view that certain consequences of the adoption of atemporal notion of truth, despite their apparent oddity, are quite acceptable from an antirealist point of view. (shrink)

This study consists of two parts. The first is an examination of the hermeneutical presuppositions underlying the theory of models that Moshe Idel has applied to the study of Jewish mysticism. Idel has opted for a typological approach based on multiple explanatory models, a methodology that purportedly proffers a polychromatic as opposed to a monochromatic orientation associated with Scholem and the so-called school based on his teachings. The three major models delineated by Idel are the theosophical-theurgical, the ecstatic, and the (...) magical or talismanic. Idel’s hermeneutic rests on the assumption that the phenomenon of Jewish mysticism (as the phenomenon of religion more generally) cannot be essentialized, and therefore no one methodological approach should be privileged as the exclusive means to ascertain it. In the second part of this study, I raise the possibility that affirming set patterns of thought and a unified system of symbols that link together kabbalists from different historical periods might not inevitably implicate the scholar in a methodological reductionism. Moving beyond a binary logic, which is still operative in the postmodern dichotomy of truth and dissimulation, I surmise that the polysemic nature of the text that may be elicited from kabbalistic sources is not dependent on the rejection of laying claim to an inherent and original intent that is recoverable through proper philological attunement. Multivocality and essentialism are not mutually exclusive. Kabbalah, I submit, is a cultural-literary phenomenon that illustrates an open system in which each moment is a mix of newness and repetition, each event a renewed singularity. The hermeneutical praxis appropriate to this system displays a temporality linked to the conception of time in its most rudimentary form as an instant of diremptive reiteration, the repetition of the same as different in the renewal of the different as same. The tendency to generalize, therefore, should not be misconstrued as viewing the variegated history of Jewish mystical doctrines and practices monolithically. (shrink)

In response to a recent challenge that the New B-theory of Time argues invalidly from the claim that tensed sentences have tenseless truth conditions to the conclusion that temporal reality is tenseless, I argue that while early B-theorists may have relied on some such inference, New B-theorists do not. Giving tenseless truth conditions for tensed sentences is not intended to prove that temporal reality is tenseless. Rather, it is intended to undermine the A-theorist’s move from claims (...) about the irreducibility of tensed language to the conclusion that temporal reality must be tensed. I then examine how A-theorists have used facts about language in attempting to establish their conclusions about the nature of temporal reality. I take the recent work of William Lane Craig and argue that he implicitly and illicitly moves from facts about temporal language to his conclusion that temporal reality is tensed. (shrink)

Global directional eliminativists deny that there is any global direction to time. This paper provides a way to understand everyday temporal assertions—assertions made outside the physics or metaphysics rooms, the truth of which appears to require that time has a global direction—on the assumption that global directional eliminativism is true.

This paper is in three sections. In the first I describe and illustrate three uses of indices of truth in semantics. The way I illustrate this classification is not completely uncontroversial, but I expect that my intuitions on this matter are generally shared. In the second section I broach a question which is central to the metaphysics of time, namely: how should certain temporal indices of truth - times - be fitted within this classificatory scheme? I sketch (...) three proposals as to how this might be done, and show how they constitute different metaphysical conceptions of the nature of time. Finally, in the third section I turn to a specific problem with the classification of times (as indices of truth) I call 'non-indexical'. Mellor (1981) thinks this problem insoluble, and argues that it shows this classification to be absurd. However, by appealing to the modal analogues of the issues involved, I first show that Mellor's argument is question- begging, and then go on to show how the non-indexical classification of times might undermine the presuppositions on which his argument rests. The paper attempts to contribute to a discussion of the question raised in section II, not to provide a definitive answer to it. (shrink)

Our ascriptions of content to utterances in the past attribute to them a level of determinacy that extends beyond what could supervene upon the usage up to the time of those utterances. If one accepts the truth of such ascriptions, one can either (1) argue that subsequent use must be added to the supervenience base that determines the meaning of a term at a time, or (2) argue that such cases show that meaning does not supervene upon use at (...) all. The following will argue against authors such as Lance, Hawthorn and Ebbs that first of these options is the more promising of the two. However, maintaining the supervenience thesis ultimately requires understanding the relation between use and meaning as 'normative' in two important ways. The first (more familiar) way is that the function from use to meaning must be of a sort that allows us to maintain a robust distinction between correct usage and actual usage. This first type of normativity is accepted by defenders of many more temporally restricted versions of the supervenience thesis, but the second sort of normativity is unique to theories that extend the supervenience base into the future. In particular, if meaning is partially a function of future use, we can understand other commitments we are often taken to have about meaning, particularly the commitment to meaning being 'determinate', as practical commitments that structure our linguistic practices rather than theoretical commitment that merely describe such practices. (shrink)

A contrary-to-duty obligation (sometimes called a reparational duty) is a conditional obligation where the condition is forbidden, e.g. “if you have hurt your friend, you should apologise”, “if he is guilty, he should confess”, and “if she will not keep her promise to you, she ought to call you”. It has proven very difficult to find plausible formalisations of such obligations in most deontic systems. In this paper, we will introduce and explore a set of temporal alethic dyadic deontic (...) systems, i.e., systems that include temporal, alethic and dyadic deontic operators. We will then show how it is possible to use our formal apparatus to symbolise contrary-to-duty obligations and to solve the so-called contrary-to-duty (obligation) paradox, a problem well known in deontic logic. We will argue that this response to the puzzle has many attractive features. Semantic tableaux are used to characterise our systems proof theoretically and a kind of possible world semantics, inspired by the so-called T× W semantics, to characterise them semantically. Our models contain several different accessibility relations and a preference relation between possible worlds, which are used in the definitions of the truth conditions for the various operators. Soundness results are obtained for every tableau system and completeness results for a subclass of them. (shrink)

If ordinary objects have temporal parts, then temporal predications have the following truth conditions: necessarily, ( a is F) at t iff a has a temporal part that is located at t and that is F. If ordinary objects have temporal counterparts, then, necessarily, ( a is F) at t iff a has a temporal counterpart that is located at t and that is F. The temporal-parts account allows temporal predication to be (...) closed under the parthood relation: since all that is required to be F at t is to have a temporal part, a t , that is located at t and that is F, every object that has a t as a temporal part is F at t . Similarly for the temporal-counterparts account. Both closure under parthood and closure under counterparthood are shown to have unacceptable consequences. Then strategies for avoiding closure are considered and rejected. (shrink)

The English perfect involves two fundamental components of meaning: a truth-conditional one involving temporal notions and a current relevance presupposition best expressed in terms drawn from the analysis of modality. The proposal made here draws much for the Extended Now theory (McCoard 1978 and others), but improves on it by showing that many aspects of the perfect's meaning may be factored out into independent semantic or pragmatic principles.

A contrary-to-duty obligation (sometimes called a reparational duty) is a conditional obligation where the condition is forbidden, e.g. “if you have hurt your friend, you should apologise”, “if he is guilty, he should confess”, and “if she will not keep her promise to you, she ought to call you”. It has proven very difficult to find plausible formalisations of such obligations in most deontic systems. In this paper, we will introduce and explore a set of temporal alethic dyadic deontic (...) systems, i.e., systems that include temporal, alethic and dyadic deontic operators. We will then show how it is possible to use our formal apparatus to symbolise contrary-to-duty obligations and to solve the so-called contrary-to-duty (obligation) paradox, a problem well known in deontic logic. We will argue that this response to the puzzle has many attractive features. Semantic tableaux are used to characterise our systems proof theoretically and a kind of possible world semantics, inspired by the so-called T× W semantics, to characterise them semantically. Our models contain several different accessibility relations and a preference relation between possible worlds, which are used in the definitions of the truth conditions for the various operators. Soundness results are obtained for every tableau system and completeness results for a subclass of them. (shrink)

Prima facie, there are two kinds of expression used in English to make reference to time: those involving explicit mention of time and temporal ordering relations, and tenses involving no such explicit reference. Taking as a criterion of adequacy the unification of both these aspects, a systematization is proposed (owing much to Reichenbach) which provides a characterization of tenses. The theory is not based on the notion of a proposition with variable truth value which formed the cornerstone of (...) Arthur Prior’s work. His conception receives a good deal of criticism, ultimately on the ground that relativising to exactly one time is inadequate. We don’t know in advance whether or not no time of perhaps more than one time is relevant, and where this is the case, the analysis cannot be reduced to propositions true at just one time. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of neuroscientific theories of consciousness. These include theories which explicitly point to EM fields, notably Operational Architectonics and, more recently, the General Resonance Theory. In phenomenological terms, human consciousness is a unified composition of contents. These contents are specific and meaningful, and they exist from a subjective point of view. Human conscious experience is temporally continuous, limited in content, and coherent. Based upon those phenomenal observations, pre-existing theories of consciousness, and a large (...) body of experimental evidence, I derived the Temporally-Integrated Causality Landscape. In brief, the TICL proposes that the neural correlate of consciousness is a structure of temporally integrated causality occurring over a large portion of the thalamocortical system. This structure is composed of a large, integrated set of neuronal elements, which contains some subsystems, defined as having a higher level of temporally-integrated causality than the System as a whole. Each Subsystem exists from the point of view of the System, in the form of meaningful content. In this article, I review the TICL and consider the importance of EM forces as a mechanism of neural causality. I compare the fundamentals of TICL to those of several other neuroscientific theories. Using five major characteristics of phenomenal consciousness as a standard, I compare the basic tenets of Integrated Information Theory, Global Neuronal Workspace, General Resonance Theory, Operational Architectonics, and the Temporo-spatial Theory of Consciousness with the framework of the TICL. While the literature concerned with these theories tends to focus on different lines of evidence, there are fundamental areas of agreement. This means that, in time, it may be possible for many of them to converge upon the truth. In this analysis, I conclude that a primary distinction which divides these theories is the feature of spatial and temporal nesting. Interestingly, this distinction does not separate along the fault line between theories explicitly concerned with EM fields and those which are not. I believe that reconciliation is possible, at least in principle, among those theories that recognize the following: just as the contents of consciousness are distinctions within consciousness, the neural correlates of conscious content should be distinguishable from but fall within the spatial and temporal boundaries of the full neural correlates of consciousness. (shrink)

I begin by briefly mentioning two different logical fatalistic argument types: one from temporal necessity, and one from antecedent truth value. It is commonly thought that the latter of these involves a simple modal fallacy and is easily refuted, and that the former poses the real threat to an open future. I question the conventional wisdom regarding these argument types, and present an analysis of temporal necessity that suggests the anti-fatalist might be better off shifting her argumentative (...) strategy. Specifically, two points of interest emerge from my analysis: first, temporal necessity turns out to be an inappropriate and ineffective tool for the fatalist to make use of; and, second, the dismissal of the argument from antecedent truth value turns out to be an over-hasty one. (shrink)

In conclusion, then, the notion of temporal necessity is certainly queer and perhaps a misnomer. It really has little to do with temporality per se and everything to do with counterfactual openness or closedness. We have seen that the future is as unalterable as the past, but that this purely logical truth is not antithetical to freedom or contingency. Moreover, we have found certain past facts are counterfactually open in that were future events or actualities to be other (...) than they will be, these past facts would have been different as a consequence. God's beliefs about the future are such past facts. Moreover, the effects of actions which God would have taken had He believed differently are also such past facts. Oddly enough, then, virtually any past fact is potentially counterfactually open, and the only necessity that remains is purely de facto. We, of course, do not in general know which events of the past depend counterfactually on present actions, and those cases we do know about seem rather trivial. Our intuitions of the necessity, unalterability, and unpreventability of the past as opposed to the future stem from the impossibility of backward causation, which is precluded by the dynamic nature of time and becoming. But the counterfactual dependence of God's beliefs on future events or actualities is not a case of backward causation: rather future-tense propositions are true in virtue of what will happen, given a view of truth as correspondence, and God simply has the essential property of knowing all and only true propositions. With regard to the future, virtually all facts are counterfactually open, and therefore future-tense propositions are not temporally necessary. Propositions thus move from being temporally contingent to being temporally necessary when all the opportunities to affect things counterfactually have slipped by. Hence, the mere fact that an event is past is no indication that it is counterfactually closed. This is especially evident in the case of God's foreknowledge. If we say that God foreknows that I shall do x and therefore I cannot refrain from doing x, lest I change God's past foreknowledge, we are being deceived by a modality which has nothing to do with my power or freedom. All that is impossible is the conjunction of God's foreknowledge that p and of ~ p; but this modality in sensu composito has no bearing on my ability to act such that ~ p would be true and God would have foreknown differently. Temporal necessity, then, turns out to be only obliquely temporal and modally weak, certainly no threat to freedom or divine foreknowledge. (shrink)

Those who believe that ordinary things have temporal as well as spatial parts must give an account of the truth conditions of temporally modified predications of the form ‘a is F at t ’ in terms of temporal parts. I will argue that the friend of temporal parts is committed to an account of temporal predication that is incompatible with the classical principle of predicate abstraction.

I offer some responses to Prosser’s ‘Experiencing Time’, one of whose goals is to debunk a view of temporal experience somewhat prevalent in the metaphysics literature, which I call ‘Perceptualism’. According to Perceptualism: it is part of the content of perceptual experience that time passes in a metaphysically strong sense: the present has a metaphysically privileged status, and time passes in virtue of changes in which events this ‘objective present’ highlights, and moreover this gives us evidence in favor of (...) strong passage. Prosser argues that perception cannot be sensitive to whether the strong passage obtains, and therefore cannot represent strong passage in a way that gives us evidence of its truth. Although I accept this conclusion, I argue that Prosser’s argument for it is problematic. It threatens to over-generalize to rule out uncontroversial cases of perceptual knowledge, such as our knowledge that we live in a spatial world. Furthermore, a successful argument ruling out perceptual evidence for strong passage would have to give constraints on the theory/observation distinction of a kind not provided by Prosser’s discussion. I also comment on several other parts of the book. (shrink)

According to presentism, everything that exists is present. According to the truthmaker principle, for every true proposition there is a truthmaker – an entity that suffices for the truth of that proposition. According to realism about the past, there are true propositions about the past. Together these claims necessitate presently existing truthmakers for truths about the past (presentist truthmakers). Cameron (2010) argues that temporal distributional properties (TDPs) can play the role of presentist truthmakers. Corkum (2014) argues that they (...) cannot. I argue against Corkum’s objections. In §2, I introduce and outline the motivation for TDPs. In §3, I show that unless TDPs are stipulated to be fundamental, as Cameron does, they can be reduced to temporal non–distributional properties, which are unable to play the role of presentist truthmakers. In §4, I argue against Corkum’s two objections to Cameron’s stipulation. Corkum’s first objection is that Cameron has no grounds on which to stipulate that TDPs are fundamental, and that the reducibility of TDPs to temporal non–distributional properties (as discussed in §3) shows that they are not. I argue that the burden of proof is not on Cameron to argue that TDPs are fundamental, but on Corkum to argue that they are not, and that to argue from the reducibility of TDPs to their non–fundamentality is to beg the question against Cameron: the reduction is only possible once their non–fundamentality is assumed. Corkum’s second objection is that if Cameron is allowed to stipulate that TDPs are fundamental in order to escape objections, then Bigelow's (1996) account is allowed to make the same move, rendering Cameron’s account redundant. I argue that the cases are asymmetric: the alternative account faces a legitimate objection whilst Cameron’s account does not. (shrink)

R.L. Epstein and E. Buitrago-Díaz aspire to present a vitally new approach to temporal logic, an approach based on the idea of absolute truth-values. They claim the existing approaches are confused and incoherent, and contain a significant number of nonsenses. The alleged problems are generated by truth-values being relativized to positions in time. The fundamental incoherence consists in some confusion between propositions and their schemata. Epstein and Buitrago-Díaz have formulas be simply true or false and describe fixed (...) areas of time. I endeavour to show that all objections Epstein and Buitrago-Díaz raise to existing temporal logic are misunderstandings. The calculus they present is easily reconstructable in existing calculi, so there is no new approach here. However, the calculus is correct and may be of some interest in logic. (shrink)

In the first section of the chapter, I scrutinize Howard Stein’s 1991 definition of a transitive becoming relation that is Lorentz invariant. I argue first that Stein’s analysis gives few clues regarding the required characteristics of the relation complementary to his becoming—i.e. the relation of indefiniteness. It turns out that this relation cannot satisfy the condition of transitivity, and this fact can force us to reconsider the transitivity requirement as applied to the relation of becoming. I argue that the relation (...) of becoming need not be transitive, as long as it satisfies the weaker condition of “cumulativity”: for a given observer the area of the events that have become real should not diminish as time progresses. I show that there are actually two relations of becoming that meet this weakened condition: Stein’s (transitive) relation of causal past connectibility and the (non-transitive) relation that is the logical complement of the future causal connectibility. In the second part of the chapter I defend Stein’s notion of temporal becoming against the attack that appeals to quantum-mechanical non-locality. I critically evaluate the argument given by Mauro Dorato (1996) that purports to show that space-like separated measurements done on the EPR system have to be mutually determinate. Finally, in order to account for the truth of counterfactual statements that link the space-like separated outcomes, I propose a dynamic conception of becoming, according to which the sphere of determinate events as of a given point may depend on the physical phenomena transpiring at this point. (shrink)

Another paper exploring the relation between Temporal externalism and Epistemicism about Vagueness, but with slightly more emphasis on the role of constitutive norms relating to our concept of truth.

A common approach in the Philosophy of Time, particularly in enquiry into the metaphysical nature of time, has been to examine various aspects of the nature of human temporal experience, and ask what, if anything, can be discerned from this about the nature of time itself. Many human traits have explanations that reside in facts about our evolutionary history. We ask whether features of human temporal experience might admit of such evolutionary explanations. We then consider the implications of (...) any proposed evolutionary explanations for the veridicality of these experiences, and for the truth-value of folk beliefs about time that are based on them. (shrink)

This article recapitulates and develops the attempts in the Nietzschean traditions to address and overcome the proliferation of nihilism that Nietzsche predicted to unfold in the next 200 years (WP 2). Nietzsche approached nihilism not merely as a psychology but as a labyrinthic and pervasive historical process whereby the highest values of culture and founding assumptions of philosophical thought prevented the further flourishing of life. Therefore, he thought nihilism had to be encountered and experienced on many, often opposing, fronts to (...) be fully consumed and left behind. Thus, just as Nietzsche captured the subtle reinventions of nihilism in new forms in his time, in the new doers assumed behind new deeds (WP 488), this article focuses on the contemporary tectonic shifts brought by digital technology and challenges subjectivation and narrativization of algorithmic will to power in human-like interfaces such as ChatGPT. Having identified philosophers and himself as the most advanced nihilists in their overvaluation of truth, in the 4th part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche grappled with the difficult, perhaps impossible, temporality of post-nihilistic historicity that oscillates between highest creativity and highest truths, especially in the sections entitled The Shadow and At Noon whereby he explored new temporal techniques to evade the relapses into temporal nihilisms of the notions of linear progress or eternity (TSZ, 4). By drawing on this juncture, this article offers ways to address transfigurations of nihilism behind new technological performances of subjectivity. The article points toward creative temporalities beyond narrativity and subjectivity insofar as the statistical operations and probabilistic estimations of language-models exceed grammatical construction of meaning. This multifaceted application of his thought on the contemporary ontic reality is necessary to perceive our comet's incalculable movement as a veritable ray of sunshine. (shrink)

Taking divine omniscience as including temporal omniscience, which means God exists at all times and knows everything, I point out the fallacies in an incompatibilist argument. Syntactically, due to misapplication of the principle of substitutivity, this incompatibilist argument isn’t valid. Semantically, due to cancelation of a supposition on which God’s earlier belief depends, an agent’s alternative action won’t result in falsification of divine belief. Finally, by appealing to an eternalist conception of truth of proposition about the future, I (...) argue that what divine belief entails isn’t the necessity of an agent’s action but the action itself, and put forward a notion of conditional fatalism, which allows for human free will. (shrink)

The publication of Frege’s Begriffsschrift in 1879 forever altered the landscape for many Western philosophers. Here, Sebastian Rödl traces how the Fregean influence, written all over the development and present state of analytic philosophy, led into an unholy alliance of an empiricist conception of sensibility with an inferentialist conception of thought. -/- According to Rödl, Wittgenstein responded to the implosion of Frege’s principle that the nature of thought consists in its inferential order, but his Philosophical Investigations shied away from offering (...) an alternative. Rödl takes up the challenge by turning to Kant and Aristotle as ancestors of this tradition, and in doing so identifies its unacknowledged question: the relation of judgment and truth to time. Rödl finds in the thought of these two men the answer he urges us to consider: the temporal and the sensible, and the atemporal and the intelligible, are aspects of one reality and cannot be understood independently of one another. In demonstrating that an investigation into the categories of the temporal can be undertaken as a contribution to logic, Rödl seeks to transform simultaneously our philosophical understanding of both logic and time. (shrink)

This essay shows how, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the relation between the protagonists can be seen as an insurmountable contrast between two different cultures – on the one hand, the “diurnal” and “rational” culture of Rome and, on the other hand, the “nocturnal” and “passionate” culture of Egypt –, but also as an opposition between two different ways of understanding the relation between illusion and reality, appearance and truth, and thus between theatre and life. More specifically, what emerges (...) is the awareness that art, embodied in Cleopatra’s beauty, constantly reminds us of the unredeemable finitude and transience of the human being, who is inevitably immersed in time. In this light, if art is able to become a manifestation of truth, the fact remains that such truth, as final sense, is something that art can “show”, but only to indicate its perpetually elusive character. It is indeed a truth which, like the indecipherable secret kept in the Mausoleum, cannot be “told” or “represented” once and for all. (shrink)

The study of the meanings of temporal expressions in natural language can proceed in two ways. The first consists of borrowing an ontological theory concerning how time “really” is, and then showing how temporal expressions are interpreted in this model. Let us call this the physicalist approach. The other approach is to start off by studying the temporal presuppositions employed in the language, and defining a model as the structure which satisfies these conditions. This approach we shall (...) call the analytist approach. The two approaches share their goal, which is to provide a temporal model for natural language. However, they are driven by different motivations. The physicalist approach is ontology-driven. It views time as part of reality, and its structure as independent of linguistic considerations. It attempts to interpret the language in this model, possibly by adding assumptions about the language. The analytist approach, on the other hand, is language driven. It assumes that language “mirrors” reality to the extent in which it is describable in the language, and tries to define a temporal model based only on linguisticconsiderations. A theory is “complete”, in a sense, if it combines both approaches and its (analytist) language- driven model can be constructed in a (physicalist) ontology-driven structure. (shrink)

It is usually agreed that reality is temporal in the sense of containing entities that exist in time, but some philosophers, roughly those who have been traditionally called A-theorists, hold that reality is temporal in a far more profound sense than what is implied by the mere existence of such entities. This hypothesis of deep temporality typically involves two ideas: that reality is temporally compartmentalised into distinct present, past, and future ‘realms’, and that this compartmentalisation is temporally dynamic (...) in the sense that the boundaries of those temporal realms change from one moment to the next. The truth of something like this hypothesis is commonly thought to require that at least some of the facts that fundamentally constitute reality be tensed. While this seems plausible, realism about fundamental tensed facts does not seem to entail deep temporality. Nor is it clear exactly what realism about tense amounts to, given that no informative answer has been given to the question of what it is for a fact to be tensed. In this paper, I introduce a novel approach, perspectivalism about temporal reality, that seeks to vindicate the hypothesis of deep temporality by ascribing to reality a certain kind of temporally perspectival structure, which also provides a straightforward answer to the question of what the tensedness of facts consists in as well as to the question of what it is for reality to be constituted by such facts. (shrink)

This article develops a notion of the ‘politics of time’ in order to analyse the effects that imaginations of future emergencies have in the fields of law and economy. Building on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social time, it focuses on the multiplex temporalities in contemporary society, which are shown to interact differently with the ‘emergency imaginary’. We demonstrate that the apprehension of the future in terms of sudden, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic events reinforces current modes of producing financial futurity, while (...) it undermines the procedural rhythm and retroactive sentencing of liberal law. As a whole, the article supplements the analysis of the ‘politics of truth’ prevalent in the current debate about precaution and pre-emption with a theoretical perspective on social temporality. (shrink)

Hermeneutics in the twentieth century opened the way for thought of history and time in terms of the very emergence of meaning or the “interpretation” of being as such. Referring to Heidegger and his successors, this chapter contends that the themes of historicity and temporality grant philosophical access to truth and universality in experience without the demand for an “objective” view of things‐in‐themselves or of the very conditions of rationality and human agency. It begins with a reflection on Heidegger's (...) radical appropriation of the older hermeneutic tradition. The chapter also argues that the core themes of hermeneutics, historicity and temporality, open the way for rethinking our relation to truth and universality. Finally, the chapter highlights that while hermeneutics discloses the irreducibly historical and temporal nature of our existential situation as finite human beings without the idea of an independent and objectively certain relation to reality. (shrink)

Theological incompatibility arguments suggest God's comprehensive foreknowledge is incompatible with human free will. Logical incompatibility arguments suggest a complete set of truths about the future is logically incompatible with human free will. Of the two, most think theological incompatibility is the more severe problem; but hardly anyone thinks either kind of argument presents a real threat to free will. I will argue, however, that sound theological and logical incompatibility arguments exist and that, in fact, logical incompatibly is the more severe (...) problem. A deep analysis of the arguments will reveal that, to avoid a fatalist conclusion, we must reject bivalence and adopt a specific kind of temporal ontology (presentism), which also forces the theist to embrace open theism. (shrink)

Temporal Type Theory (TTT) has been recently introduced as a topos-theoretic approach to understanding the behaviour of systems over time. A truly innovative point of TTT is that it makes truth inherently dependent on time; this is to be contrasted with the classical approach in which past, present and future are related via logical operators. Further on this line of research, the notion of truth is substituted by the ‘time duration’ over which a proposition is true, giving (...) rise to the logic of temporal landscapes. In this paper, we embed the main notions of the Calendar and Time Type System (a framework that was built for reasoning about calendric notions in the context of the Web and is centred around the notion of time granularity) in Temporal Type Theory, attempting to address a common requirement in the practical use of temporal formalisms: the ability to speak about certain time moments and appropriate time windows in (past and future) time, in the form of hours, dates, holidays, etc. With a view to concrete applications, we provide examples on how calendar types can be combined with temporal operators of TTT to augment the expressive power of this framework. In that respect, the addition of calendar types genuinely adds to the range of Temporal Type Theory as a powerful specification language. (shrink)

An assessment of the similarities and differences between space and time has played an important part in the development of the views of a number of philosophers about time. Examples of statements about time are compared with allegedly corresponding statements about space to give us analogies and disanalogies according to whether the statements have the same or different truth values. But what are the general principles on which such comparisons are based? In particular, according to what criteria are corresponding (...) sentences paired off? Are there any such general criteria? And if so, do they already presuppose a substantial commitment to one or other of the points of view at issue where analogies and disanalogies are discussed? This paper is concerned with two specific proposals for criteria of correspondence, one due to Richard Gale (1968, 1969) and James Garson (1969), which is rejected, and the other tentatively advanced in its place. (shrink)

Contemporary theories of the temporal asymmetry of deliberation seek the origins of the asymmetry either in the physics of the early universe or in the epistemic orientation of agents. An attempt is made in the following lines to consolidate the rival thesis that the temporal asymmetry of deliberation is rooted in an ontological divide between the past and the future. I argue that agents can deliberate about the future but not the past because while the past is in (...) a sense real, the future is nothing at all. The argument for the thesis includes striking a connection between deliberation and truth on the one hand and truth and being on the other. The argument thus proceeds, via a modal principle, from the asymmetry of deliberation into the semantics of propositions about the past, the present, and the future and from there to the ontology of the past, the present, and the future. The ‘ticket’ for transition in the argument from semantics to ontology is a truth-making principle, according to which propositions are true or false in virtue of an existing reality. (shrink)

Relations computed by finite-state transducers are applied to interpret temporal propositions in terms of strings representing finite contexts or situations. Carnap–Montague intensions mapping indices to extensions are reformulated as relations between strings that can serve as indices and extensions alike. Strings are related according to information content, temporal span and granularity, the bounds on which reflect the partiality of natural language statements. That partiality shapes not only strings-as-extensions (indicating what statements are about) but also strings-as-indices (underlying truth (...) conditions). (shrink)

This paper explores Nicholas of Cusa’s framing of the De pace fidei as a dialogue taking place incaelo rationis. On the one hand, this framing allows Nicholas of Cusa to argue that all religious rites presuppose the truth of a single, unified faith and so temporally manifest divine logos in a way accommodated to the historically unique conventions of different political communities. On the other hand, at the end of the De pace fidei, the interlocutors in the heavenly dialogue (...) are enjoined to return to earth and lead their countrymen in a gradual conversion to the acceptance of rites which would explicitly acknowledge the metaphysically presupposed transcendent unity of all true faiths. In light of these two aspects of the literary framing of the De pace fidei, the question that motivates this paper concerns the extent to which the understanding of history subtending Cusanus’ temporal political aims is consistent with the understanding of history grounded in his metaphysical presupposition that there is una religio in omni diversitate rituum. In addressing this question, I shall argue that the literary strategy of the De pace fidei sacrifices Nicholas of Cusa’s apologetic doctrinal aims insofar as the text creates an allegorical space in which the tension between its literal and figurative dimensions assigns to its readers the task of choosing their own orientations to the significance of history as a foundation for future action. (shrink)

Discusses an argument from preventability to the effect that the past and the present are real, while the future is not. The argument draws on an analysis of ‘It is a fact that p at time t’ as ‘p, and it is logically impossible for there to exist anyone who would have been able, at t, to prevent it from being the case that p’. However, there are two strong objections to the argument from preventability, one relating to backward causation (...) and causal loops, and one relating to the truth conditions for subjunctive conditionals. (shrink)

The Romanian-born European writer Vintilă Horia - whose birth centenary is celebrated this year - was a genuine searcher of truth. His entire work pleads for transgressive-integrating knowledge, in opposition to binary logic and scientism; it is the privileged space of articulation between cognition, creation and gnosis, between the apophatism of science, mystic apofatism and artistic apofatism. Although much less known than the trilogy of exile - Dieu est né en exil, Le chevalier de la résignation and ¡Perseguid a (...) Boecio! - the small-sized novel Le voyage à San Marcos acts as an exemplary attestation to this pompous conjunction. The current article focuses especially on the text’s trans-temporal valence. (shrink)

Kant, in various parts of his treatment of causality, refers to determinism or the principle of sufficient reason as an inescapable principle. In fact, in the Second Analogy we find the elements to reconstruct a purely phenomenal determinism as a logical and tautological truth. I endeavour in this article to gather these elements into an organic theory of phenomenal causality and then show, in the third section, with a specific argument which I call the “paradox of phenomenal observation”, that (...) this phenomenal determinism is the only rational approach to causality because any logico-reductivistic approach, such as the Humean one, would destroy the temporal order and so the very possibility to talk of a causal relation. I also believe that, all things said, Kant did not achieve a much greater comprehension of the problem than Hume did, in his theory of causality, for he did not free a phenomenal approach from the impasse of reductivism as his reflections on “simultaneous causation” and “vanishing quantities” indeed show, and this I will argue in Sect. 4 of this article. (shrink)

Charles Darwin built a world around an implied metaphysics of time that treated deep time as something qualitatively different from ordinary, experienced time. He did not simply require a vast amount of time within which his primary evolutionary mechanism of natural selection could operate; in practice, he required a deep time that functioned according to different rules from those of ordinary, “shallow” time. The experience of the naturalist occupied shallow time, but it was from that experience that Darwin necessarily had (...) to build his arguments concerning a transformism that took place on an entirely different temporal scale. Much of his reconstruction of what took place in deep time relied on inferences drawn from taxonomic classification, and those inferences in turn depended to a large degree on conclusions reached through the already-established practices of his fellow non-transformist naturalists. By bootstrapping his transformist arguments, focused on both natural and sexual selection, with non-transformist classificatory judgments, Darwin attempted to convince his fellow naturalists of the truth of evolution in deep time. In other words, while Darwin argued for the existence of selectionist processes themselves in contemporary shallow time, their transformist consequences could only be traced out in deep time, being evidenced by both contemporary and paleontological slices, or laminae, of shallow time. This served to protect transformism from the dangers of unorthodoxy by preserving uniformity within shallow time. (shrink)