Edward Feser's Blog, page 48

Hayek’s Tragic Capitalism

My essay “Hayek’s Tragic Capitalism” appears in the Spring 2019 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.  (It’s behind a paywall at the moment.)  From the article:
Nor will one find in [Hayek’s] work the chirpy optimism with which many libertarians and Reaganite conservatives ritualistically defend the market economy.  Hayek’s case for free enterprise doesn’t fit any of the usual simplistic stereotypes.  He not only explicitly and persistently rejected laissez-faire, but could write as eloquently about the moral downside of capitalism and the emotional attractions of socialism as any left-winger.  In an era in which – young socialist chic notwithstanding – global capitalism appears to have swept all before it, it is the triumphalist defenders of the free market rather than its critics who have the most to learn from Hayek’s cautious, nuanced apologia… For all its purported gritty realism, however, Hayek’s fusionism is no more stable than the more familiar kind.  Even putting aside Hayek’s agnosticism and his materialist assumptions about human nature (neither of which I share), his position is seriously problematic in at least three respects…
None of this implies a condemnation of capitalism per se.  The problem is one of fetishizing capitalism, of making market imperatives the governing principles to which all other aspects of social order are subordinate.  The irony is that this is a variation on the same basic error of which socialism is guilty – what Pope John Paul II called “economism,” the reduction of human life to its economic aspect.  Even F. A. Hayek, a far more subtle thinker than other defenders of the free economy, ultimately succumbed to this tendency.  Too many modern conservatives have followed his lead.  They have been so fixated on socialism and its economic irrationality that they have lost sight of other, ultimately more insidious, threats to Western civilization – including economism itself.  To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, a madman is not someone who has lost his economic reason, but someone who has lost everything but his economic reason.
Read the whole thing.  The essay is something of a companion piece to my recent Heritage Foundation lecture on “Socialism versus the Family.”

More on presentism and truthmakers

The esteemed Bill Vallicella continues to press the truthmaker objection against presentism.  I remain unimpressed by it.  Can we break this impasse?  Let me try by, first, proposing a diagnosis of the dialectical situation.  Then I will respond to the points Bill makes in his latest post. Truthmaking and common sense
Bill, Alex Pruss, and others who are impressed by the truthmaker objection seem to think that they are merely appealing to a commonsense assumption that it would be metaphysically costly to give up, and that the trouble with presentism is that it can be reconciled with this commonsense truthmaker assumption only with considerable effort.  But I think that that is not at all what is going on.  I would say that what the critics are appealing to is not in fact a commonsense assumption, but rather a tendentious metaphysical interpretation of a commonsense assumption.  Presentism in no way conflicts with the commonsense truthmaker assumption itself.  At most, it conflicts only with the tendentious metaphysics that the critics are reading into it.
Note, before I proceed, that neither side in this dispute is saying that whatever the commonsense view turns out to be must ipso facto be the correct view.  Common sense can be wrong.  But I think both sides would agree that common sense is innocent until proven guilty, so that, all things being equal, it is better for a view to be consistent with common sense.  And what I am arguing is that, though Bill and others seem to think that presentism is at odds with common sense vis-à-vis truthmaking, they are mistaken about that.
Now, what common sense does indeed suppose is, I submit, something like this: Thoughts and sentences are, at least in most cases, made true by some reality beyond the mind and beyond language.  For example, if I have the thought that the cat is on the mat or I utter the sentence “The cat is on the mat,” then that will be true only by virtue of something distinct from my thoughts and distinct from the sentence, namely the presence of some cat on some mat.  In other words, common sense presupposes some kind of realism, as opposed to idealism or linguistic idealism. 
Naturally, common sense allows that there are somethoughts and utterances that are made true by facts about mind or language.  For example, the thought that I am now thinking about the cat on the matis made true by something going on in my mind, and the sentence “The word ‘cat’ has three letters” is made true by some fact about language.  But when I am thinking or speaking about the cat on the mat itself, the “truthmaker,” if you want to call it that, is something extra-mental and extra-linguistic.
Now, this commonsense assumption is applied to facts about the past no less than to facts about the present.  The thought that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March, and the sentence “Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March,” are true because, as a matter of extra-linguistic and mind-independent fact, Caesar really was assassinated on the Ides of March.  Caesar, his murder, and the Ides of March aren’t things I made up or hallucinated, they aren’t mere collections of ideas in my mind or in some collection of minds, and they aren’t mere byproducts of how we use words or the like. 
In no way is this at odds with presentism.  Presentism holds that, where temporal things are concerned (as opposed to eternal or aeviternal things) only present things exist.  Hence, the cat on the mat exists, but Caesar and his assassination no longer do.  But this in no way conflicts with the commonsense assumption I’ve been describing, because it doesn’t somehow make Caesar and his assassination mind-dependent or language-dependent.  It is still the case that the thought that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March and the sentence “Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March” are true only because of something extra-mental and extra-linguistic, namely Caesar’s really having been assassinated on the Ides of March.
So far so good.  The trouble begins only when contemporary analytic philosophers come along, take the innocuous commonsense assumption I’ve been describing, and transform it into something they call The Truthmaker Principle ©, which is the centerpiece of something called Truthmaker Theory (patent pending).  It is proposed that what common sense is committed to is the assumption that thoughts and sentences are made true by what exists.  Then it is suggested that this must be understand to mean what exists simpliciteror full stop.  And thenit is pointed out that in that case, whatever it is that makes thoughts and sentences about Caesar and the Ides of March true must be the same sort of thing that makes thoughts and sentences about the cat on the mat true.  The next thing you know, we are seriously entertaining the strange thesis that Caesar’s assassination must exist despite this event’s having ended over two millennia ago.  The sequel is that many dissertations, journal articles, and blog posts are written, many chins are earnestly pulled and brows furrowed, and (in my case, at least) some eyes are rolled. 
Whatever we want to say about this, it has nothing to do with common sense, and thus inherits none of the presumed innocence of common sense.  I would imagine that, if asked, common sense would say that truthmakers need not exist.  After all, common sense would say, the sentence that “Unicorns don’t exist” is true, but that’s not because of anything that exists.  Rather, the sentence is true precisely because unicorns don’t exist.  All common sense wants to say is that it is something about extra-mental and extra-linguistic reality that makes the sentence true, namely that there aren’t any unicorns in extra-mental or extra-linguistic reality.  That’s all the “truthmaking” we need.  We don’t need something to exist in order for the sentence to be true.  Perhaps common sense needs to be modified here.  We might say that the fact that unicorns exist is in some sense real, even if unicorns themselves are not.  But the point is that common sense itself doesn’t say this – it doesn’t ask or answer the sort of questions that truthmaker theorists might ask and answer.
Similarly, I imagine that common sense would say that there’s nothing in its assumption that thoughts and sentences are made true by extra-mental and extra-linguistic reality that requires that even existent “truthmakers” must exist full stop.  After all, the cat still exists and Caesar doesn’t, and yet neither depends on mind or language for the reality it has or had.  The Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopher (the ally of common sense) would add that it is odd to insist on talking about existence simpliciter or full stop.  After all, he says, we need to distinguish time, eternity, and aeviternity.  There is a clear sense in which what is eternal exists simpliciter or full stop, since it never comes into being or passes away.  But where temporal things are concerned, talk of what exists simpliciter or full stop is misleading, precisely because temporal things do come into being and pass away.  We can say that Caesar’s assassination existed simpliciter or full stop, since of course it did in fact occur.  But what does it mean to say that his assassination exists simpliciter or full stop, if this is not meant as the assertion that it exists now?  Does it mean that that it exists in an eternal way (as God does)?  That would be false, and in any case it isn’t what Bill or other critics of presentism are saying.  Does it mean that it exists in the way that past events are claimed to exist by presentism’s rival eternalism (which holds that past, present, and future things and events are equally real)?  That is certainly not an assumption that common sense would make, nor would Bill or other critics of presentism claim that eternalism is presupposed by common sense.  Into the bargain, this interpretation would beg the question against presentism. 
But what, then, does it mean to say that Caesar’s assassination exists simpliciter?  However we answer this question, we are, again, going well beyond anything assumed by common sense.  And thus we are going well beyond anything that would put the presentist at odds with common sense.
Notice that there is nothing special about presentism here.  Go back to the unicorn example.  It so happens that in the truthmaker literature, there is a lot of heavy going not only about presentism, but also about “negative existentials,” as they are called.  A thought or sentence to the effect that there are no unicornswould be an example of a negative existential.  How can our affirmation of such a thought or sentence be reconciled with the “truthmaker principle” as it is construed by many truthmaker theorists?  Do we have to give up the principle?  Do we have to modify it and allow that at least some truths lack truthmakers?  Do we have to say that the fact that there are no unicorns is among the things that exist, and that this existent is what makes true the sentence “There are no unicorns”?  Is it metaphysically extravagant to affirm the existence of such facts?
You might think this a weighty metaphysical conundrum, or you might think it much ado about very little.  Either way, it is hardly a serious reason to stop affirming negative existentials like “There are no unicorns,” “There are no mermaids,” etc.  If we have to give up either negative existentials or “truthmaker theory,” then we should give up the latter.  But again, this does not mean giving up what common sense supposes vis-à-vis “truthmaking.”  It merely means giving up some metaphysical construct that philosophers have come up with. 
Same with presentism.  If presentism conflicts with anything, it conflicts only with some tendentious theses of “truthmaker theory,” not with anything common sense supposes about what makes thoughts and sentences true. 
It seems to me that if Bill is going to insist that the truthmaker objection is a major challenge to presentism, then he ought also to start writing blog posts about what a grave challenge the truthmaker principle is to negative existentials, so that anyone who ever denies that something exists (unicorns, mermaids, the Easter Bunny, etc.) – which would, of course, include Bill himself – owes us an explanation of how he can reconcile this denial with the principle.  But if he does not think that our practice of denying the existence of things is problematic (and I am sure he does not), despite its apparent conflict with the truthmaker principle, then it seems to me that, to be consistent, he should conclude that the truthmaker objection to presentism is not after all as worrisome as he has taken it to be.
Presentism and truthmaking
Let’s turn to the points Bill makes in his latest post.  Bill writes: “I will take [Feser] to be saying that the truth-maker of 'Caesar was assassinated' is the fact of Caesar's having been assassinated.”  That’s correct.  That is indeed the view I expressed in earlier posts replying to him.  However, Bill goes on to object:
This is a concrete state of affairs, the subject constituent of which is Caesar himself. This state of affairs cannot exist unless Caesar himself exists.  Now Feser grants the obvious point that Caesar no longer exists.  That is is a datum that no reasonable person can deny. It follows that the truth-making state of affairs no longer exists either. 
On presentism, however, what no longer exists does not exist at all. 
End quote.  But the objection fails.  For it is, I would say, simply not true that “the fact of Caesar's having been assassinated… cannot exist unless Caesar himself exists.”  The correct thing to say is that the fact of Caesar’s having been assassinated cannot exist unless Caesar himself existed.  And Caesar did indeed once exist.  Hence it is false to conclude that “the truth-making state of affairs no longer exists either.”  The state of affairs of Caesar’s having beenassassinated does exist, even though Caesar himself doesn’t.   (To be sure, the state of affairs of Caesar’s being assassinated – present tense – will exist only if Caesar does, but that is not what we are talking about.  Again, what we are talking about is the state of affairs of Caesar’s having been assassinated.)
Bill says that unless Caesar exists, “there is nothing to ground the truth that Caesar was assassinated.”  But of course there is.  What grounds it is the fact that he did indeed exist and was in fact assassinated.  That’s the difference between sentences like “Caesar was assassinated” and sentences like “The Easter Bunny was assassinated.”  The Easter Bunny never did exist and thus never was assassinated.  Hence there is nothing to ground the truth of the latter sentence.
Bill is unhappy with this, apparently because he assumes that we should be able to describe all truthmakers in a tenseless way.  But there is nothing in what common sense says about truthmaking that requires that assumption, and it is an assumption that simply begs the question against presentism. 
Bill might object that the fact that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March is a weird sort of fact if Caesar does not exist.  I don’t think it is weird at all.  What would be weird is to say that Caesar exists despite having been assassinated, and that his assassination exists despite being an event that ended over two millennia ago!  Be that as it may, there are, as I noted in a previous post in this exchange with Bill, various kinds of fact and various kinds of truths.  It is a mistake to suppose that all facts and all truths must be of the same kind, and thus a mistake to suppose that all truthmakers must be of the same kind.  It is also important to note that “exists” is what Thomists would call an analogical term.  When we apply it to things as diverse as substances, accidents, relations, facts, temporal things, aeviternal things, eternal things, etc., we are not using it in a univocal way, even if we are not using it in an equivocal way either.  Hence we should not expect that what is true of some existents is going to be true of others. 
Naturally, all of this raises a host of questions, but the point is that what Bill seems to think is a clear and straightforward difficulty for presentism is in fact not clear or straightforward at all.  One has to make tendentious metaphysical assumptions, and arguably question-begging ones at that, in order to generate the tension Bill thinks exists between presentism and the truthmaker principle. 
Presentism, common sense, and begging the question
As I’ve said, I would not claim that whatever view is the commonsense view must ipso facto be true.  Still, that presentism is the commonsense view cannot plausibly be denied.  Yet Bill denies it.  He writes:
Presentism… is not common sense, nor is it 'fallout' from ordinary language.  Speaking with the vulgar I say things like, 'The Berlin Wall no longer exists.' I am using ordinary English to record a well-known historical fact. Saying this, however, I do not thereby commit myself to the controversial metaphysical claim that wholly past items are nothing at all and that present items alone exist, are real, or have being. The Berlin sentence and its innumerable colleagues are neutral with respect to the issues that divide presentists and eternalists.
End quote.  I have to say that I find this claim very strange.  Take the following two propositions:
(1) The Berlin Wall does not exist.
(2) The Berlin Wall exists.
Bill seems to be claiming that on a natural, commonsense reading of the sentence “The Berlin Wall no longer exists,” that sentence does not plausibly entail (1) rather than (2).  Rather, the sentence, as far as commonsense is concerned, is neutral between (1) and (2).  Seriously?  Surely, “The Berlin Wall no longer exists” is, on a natural or commonsense reading, equivalent to “The Berlin Wall does not exist anymore.”   And surely, on a natural or commonsense reading, the statement that the Berlin Wall does not exist anymore entails that the Berlin wall does not exist.  Whether or not you think presentism is true, then, it seems quite a stretch to say that it “is not common sense, nor is it 'fallout' from ordinary language.”
In response to the charge that he is begging the question, Bill writes:
I do not assume that only presently existing items can serve as truth-makers.  What I assume is that only existing items can serve as truth-makers.  To appreciate this, consider timeless entities.  God, classically conceived, is an example… Or consider so-called 'abstract' objects such as the number 7. It is true that 7 exists.  What makes this truth true? The number 7! So again a truth-maker needn't be temporally present, or in time at all, to serve as a truth-maker. But it must exist. 
End quote.  Well, OK, fine.  But I think Bill is missing the point I was making.  He says that the truth of “Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March” presupposes that Caesar exists.  I would say: If that is meant as a roundabout way of saying that Caesar existed, then that is true.  Of course, Bill doesn’t mean it that way.  So how does he mean it?  Does he mean that Caesar exists eternally, or perhaps aeviternally?  Surely not, since Caesar was not God or an angel or a Platonic Form.  Does he mean that Caesar exists in time?  Naturally, Bill would say that Caesar existed in time, but he also agrees that Caesar does not exist now.  But in what way does Caesar exist, then, if it is not eternally, or aeviternally, or in time now?  I imagine that Bill would respond by saying: “Caesar exists in time, but not now – rather, he exists at some earlier point in time.”  But that would beg the question against the presentist, who denies that there exist any points in time other than now. 
Perhaps Bill would say that there is some furthersense in which Caesar might be said to exist – not eternally, not aeviternally, not now, and not (on pain of begging the question) at some earlier point in time.  But if so, then we are owed an explanation of exactly what sense that is.  And whatever the answer is, it too would beg the question, at least against me, since I would deny that there are any further alternatives, and I would certainly deny that we need to posit any further ones in order to respect commonsense qualms about truthmaking.
Facts and truthmaking
Bill says that my position faces a dilemma.  The truthmaker for the thought that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March would, he says, have to be either a “fact that” or a “fact of.”  The fact that would be the propositionthat Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March.  The fact of would be a concrete state of affairs.  But it cannot be the first, because no proposition can be its own truthmaker.  And it cannot be the second, he says, because Caesar and his assassination do not exist, according to presentism.  Hence the concrete state of affairs that would be the fact of does not exist, and thus cannot serve as a truthmaker.
In response, I would say that Bill is simply describing the second horn of this purported dilemma in a tendentious way.  Yes, Caesar and his assassination do not exist, and hence the fact of Caesar’s being assassinated does not exist.  But it doesn’t follow that the fact of Caesar’s having been assassinated does not exist.  And that can serve as the truthmaker.  The fact of needn’t be what Bill supposes.  Bill will not like this since, again, he seems to assume that we must describe all truthmakers tenselessly.  But that assumption is, as I have said, question-begging.
In the comments section of Bill’s post, a reader points out that what I am talking about are facts that are neither propositions nor states of affairs with existing constituents, and that Bill “seemed to assume that such a thing is impossible rather than directly addressing the possibility” and “didn't address this other than to deny it.”  That is exactly right.  When I talk about the fact that Caesar was assassinated, I am not talking about a proposition; rather, I am talking about what the proposition that Caesar was assassinated is aboutor represents.  Nor am I talking about states of affairs with existing constituents, since Caesar and his assassination no longer exist.  Bill’s reader correctly notes that I am talking about a third possibility that Bill ignores.
Am I talking about a state of affairs of some other kind?  That depends on what you mean by “state of affairs,” an expression that is used by philosophers in different ways.  What I would say is that there are simply various ways that things are and various ways that things were, independently of thought and language, and that those are the sorts of thing I am talking about when I say that the fact that the cat is on the mat, the fact that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March, etc. are what make true the corresponding thoughts and sentences.  Since there are these ways that things are and ways that things were, you can say that they have a kind of being and thus, if you want, that they exist(even if, in the case of ways that things were, they concern things do not themselvesexist anymore).
Does this raise metaphysical issues?  Of course.  What matters for present purposes, though, is this.  First, what I’m saying doesn’t in any way conflict with what common sense supposes vis-à-vis truthmaking.  Common sense simply doesn’t get remotely close to considering recherché ontological questions about the difference between propositions and facts, the nature of facts whose constituents no longer exist, etc.  Hence, whatever qualms Bill has about my position, he cannot reasonably say that it is somehow in tension with commonsense or intuitive assumptions about truthmaking.
Second, the issues raised are not unique to presentism.  Again, that there are no unicornsis also among the ways that things are.  Now, how can there exist facts about what does notexist?  Fair question, but no one thinks the fact that we can ask it poses some urgent, earthshaking problem for our practice of saying things like “There are no unicorns.”  Similarly, that we can raise metaphysical questions about the nature of facts about things that no longer exist does not constitute some urgent, earthshaking problem for the presentist thesis that Caesar’s assassination does not exist.
I would say: Unicorns don’t exist and never did, and Caesar’s assassination does not exist even though it once did.  Truthmaker theory has to accommodate itself to these data rather than the other way around.  Bill’s problem, it seems to me, is that he is letting the tail of tendentious contemporary truthmaker theory wag the dog of (what I claim is) the presentism that common sense takes for granted.  To be sure, if he wants to present some argument for favoring the tendentious metaphysics over common sense, that’s fine.  Again, what I object to is the suggestion that the burden of proof is on the presentist rather than on the tendentious metaphysician.
Some loose ends
Bill rejects the claim I made in an earlier post to the effect that the truthmaker objection to presentism can succeed only if the critic has a plausible alternative to presentism (and the alternatives, I argue in Aristotle’s Revenge , all fail).  Bill notes that, despite his criticisms of presentism, he does not embrace the standard eternalist alternative, and in fact he is willing to allow that it might turn out that all the extant theories of time are untenable.
This might be true of Bill as a matter of biographical fact, but it is irrelevant to the point I was making.  The truthmaker objection to presentism holds that a sentence like “Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March” can be true only if Caesar exists, and the objection concedes that Caesar does not exist now.  But then the person raising the objection owes us an explanation of exactly howCaesar can intelligibly be said to exist if he doesn’t exist now (and also doesn’t exist eternally or aeviternally).  And as I noted above, the only answer on offer is the claim that he exists at some past point in time, as theories like eternalism and the growing block theory would hold.  But in that case, the truthmaker objection, to be intelligible, at least implicitly presupposes that some such alternative theory is correct.  It will not do, then, to say that one can coherently press the truthmaker objection against presentism and at the same time hold that none of the alternative theories are any good.  The objection will not work unless some alternative theory also works. 
Finally, Bill comments in passing on a brief remark I made in Aristotle’s Revenge (at p. 239) to the effect that there is a sense in which past events exist now insofar as their effects remain.  Bill says:
[I]t is not clear to me how this notion (causal trace theory) is supposed to cohere with what Feser says elsewhere in his section on time. How does it cohere with what we discussed above?  It is one thing to say that the truth-maker of 'Caesar was assassinated' is the fact that C. was assassinated, and quite another to say that the truth-maker exists in the present in the form of present effects of C.'s past existence.  
End quote.  I don’t think Bill read what I wrote with sufficient care.  What I actually wrote in Aristotle’s Revenge is that “past and future exist now only in the loose sense that they are, as it were, causally contained in what exists now” but that “what actually exists in the strict sense is what exists now” (p. 239, emphasis added).  The qualifiers “loose” and “strict” should have made it clear what I meant, and why there is no conflict between what I said about causal traces and the presentist thesis that past events do not exist.  And I never said (nor would I say) that Caesar’s effect on the present is the truthmaker for the sentence “Caesar was assassinated.” 
Related posts:
Vallicella on the truthmaker objection against presentism
Vallicella on existence-entailing relations and presentism
Aristotelians ought to be presentists
Gödel and the unreality of time
A difficulty for Craig’s kalām cosmological argument?
Yeah, but is it actually actually infinite?

Some comments on the open letter

What should we think of the recent open letter accusing Pope Francis of heresy, signed by Fr. Aidan Nichols, Prof. John Rist, and other priests and academics (and for which Prof. Josef Seifert has now expressed his support)?  Like others who have commented on it, I think the letter overstates things in its main charge and makes some bad arguments, but that it also makes many correct and important points that cannot reasonably be dismissed merely because the letter is seriously deficient in other respects.  As to the main charge, it is true that a pope can fall into doctrinal error, even material heresy, when not speaking ex cathedra.  However, whether and how a pope can be charged with formal heresy, and what the consequences would be if he were guilty of it, are simply much less clear-cut canonically and theologically than the letter implies.  Some of the Church’s greatest theologians have speculated about the matter, and while there are serious arguments for various possible positions, there is no theological consensus and no magisterial teaching which resolves the issue.  Moreover, a pope falling into formal heresy would be about as grave a crisis for the Church as can be imagined.  So, maximum caution is called for before making such a charge, and in my opinion it is simply rash flatly to accuse the pope of “the canonical delict of heresy,” as the letter does.
Some of the arguments deployed are also ill-advised, to say the least.  For example, it was foolish to appeal to the allegedly sinister shape of the staff that the pope used in a particular mass as evidence of heretical intent.  To be sure, the open letter does not make much of this, but it is a bad argument, and the letter’s critics have understandably pounced on it.
I would guess that these serious problems with the letter are one reason that it did not gather more signatures, though it is certainly significant that it attracted signatories as formidable as Nichols and Rist.  (This is not meant in any way as a slight against the other signatories, some of whom are also formidable scholars.  But most of them have signed several other public statements critical of Pope Francis, so the fact that they signed this one is less noteworthy than the fact that Nichols and Rist signed it.) 
Another reason, I suspect, is that by now it seems that there is little point to further public letters and petitions critical of Pope Francis, when several others have already been issued and simply ignored by the pope, the cardinals, and the bishops.  (I signed one of them myself.)  I realize that the signatories to this latest open letter do not suppose they are likely to move the bishops to action, but merely want to get into the historical record a summary of the problems with some of Pope Francis’s words and actions and the fact that there were faithful Catholic scholars who criticized them.  But there is a point to doing even that much only if the letter adds something new and significant to the previous letters and petitions, and the main thing this one adds is a charge that is, as I say, rashly made. 
Having said all that, it simply will not do for critics of the letter to point to its deficiencies and then roll over and go back to sleep.  The letter, however problematic, is a response to statements and actions of the pope that are also seriously problematic.  And if its rashness reflects a kind of exasperation on the part of the signatories, it cannot reasonably be denied that the pope can indeed be exasperating. 
For example, Pope Francis has made many statements that at least seem to contradict traditional Catholic teaching on divorce and remarriage, conscience, grace, the diversity of religions, contraception,capital punishment, and a variety of other topics.  The open letter is right about that.  Indeed, at least where the number of problematic statements from Pope Francis is concerned, the open letter actually understates the case, because it does not address the pope’s remarks about contraception, capital punishment, or certain other issues.  The sheer volume of these problematic statements is alarming in itself, whatever one thinks of any one of them considered in isolation.  You can find previous popes who have made a theologically problematic statement here or there.  You cannot find a previous pope who has made so manytheologically problematic statements. 
It is true that the pope’s defenders have come up with ways to read some of these statements so as to reconcile them with traditional doctrine.  But there are two general problems with such attempts, even apart from the fact that not all of the proposed readings are terribly plausible.
First, and as I have pointed out before, when defending the doctrinal soundness of a statement, it does not suffice to come up with some strained or unnatural interpretation that avoids strict heresy.  That is a much lower standard than the Church herself has applied historically, and would rule out very little. 
To take an example I have used in the past, even the statement “God does not exist” could be given an orthodox interpretation if you strain hard enough.  You could say: “What I mean when I say that is that God does not ‘exist’ in the sense of merely having or participating in existence, the way other things do.  Rather, he just is Subsistent Being Itself and the source of the existence of other things.”  The trouble is that the average person would not understand such a high falutin’ interpretation even if it occurred to him.  The average person would naturally hear the statement in question as an expression of atheism.  He would be especially likely to do so if the statement was addressed to a mass audience rather than to an audience of academics, and if the person who made the statement did not himself clarify things by explicitly giving a non-atheistic interpretation. 
A theological statement – especially when made by a churchman to a mass audience – should be clearly orthodox on a natural reading, not merely arguably orthodox on some creative reading.  This is why the Church has traditionally held that being strictly heretical is only one of several ways that a statement can be doctrinally objectionable.  Even a statement that is not explicitly heretical might still be erroneous, or proximate to heresy, or rash, or ambiguous, or “offensive to pious ears,” or subject to one of the other theological censureswith which the Church has in the past condemned various theological opinions. 
Where the question of problematic papal statements is concerned, we might consider the cases of Pope Honorius I and Pope John XXII, who are frequently cited as the two clearest examples of popes who arguably were guilty of heresy.  Their defenders have argued that the precise wording of the statements that got them into trouble could be construed as strictly heretical only in light of later dogmatic definitions, rather than in light of definitions already on the books in their day.  Even if that is the case, however, the fact remains that John XXII, who had denied that the blessed in heaven immediately enjoy the beatific vision after death, recanted this error in the face of vigorous criticism from the theologians of his day.  The fact remains that Honorius was condemned by two later popes for his statements, which at least gave aid and comfort to the Monothelite heresy.  Pope St. Leo II declared:
We anathematize… Honorius, who did not attempt to sanctify this Apostolic Church with the teaching of Apostolic tradition, but by profane treachery permitted its purity to be polluted.and:
Honorius… did not, as became the Apostolic authority, extinguish the flame of heretical teaching in its first beginning, but fostered it by his negligence.
So, whether or not Honorius and John XXII were guilty of strict heresy, they were undeniably guilty of making statements that fell under one or more of the lesser theological censures cited above.  Similarly, even if Pope Francis’s problematic statements can be given readings that avoid strict heresy, it doesn’t follow that they can avoid falling under one or more of the lesser theological censures.
The second problem with the proposed explanations of Pope Francis’s remarks is that it is the pope himself, and not his defenders, who should be providing them, and he has persistently refused to do so.  The open letter is right to complain about this.  For one thing, upholding traditional teaching and resolving doctrinal disputes is the main job of a pope.  Hence, that he has still not responded to the now famous dubia(to take just one example) is indefensible.  He has in this regard clearly failed to do his duty, and it is intellectually dishonest for his defenders to pretend otherwise.  Had the pope simply reaffirmed traditional teaching in response to these straightforward and respectfully presented questions from several of his cardinals, the main doctrinal controversy that has roiled his pontificate would have been swiftly resolved. 
For another thing, what a person fails to say, and how he acts, can “send a message” no less than what he does explicitly say.  The open letter is also right to emphasize that.  Suppose, to return to my example, that I not only publicly stated “God does not exist,” but also refused to say one way or the other whether I myself endorsed the non-atheistic interpretation of this utterance proposed by some of my defenders on my behalf.  Suppose also that I frequently praised atheist thinkers like Nietzsche, Marx, Sartre, et al. and frequently criticized theistic religions and thinkers.  But suppose too that, for all that, I still denied that I was an atheist.  People would naturally be confused, and many would suspect that I was simply engaging in double-talk – that I really was an atheist but didn’t want to be entirely frank about it.
Similarly, when the pope not only makes theologically ambiguous statements about divorce and remarriage, conscience, etc. but refuses to clarify those statements, and promotes and praises people with a reputation for departing from traditional teaching in these areas while criticizing and sidelining people with a reputation for upholding traditional teaching, it is hardly surprising if many people worry – whether correctly or not – that he does not agree with traditional teaching but doesn’t want to say so directly. 
Suppose that the open letter had alleged, not that the pope is guilty of the canonical delict of heresy, but rather that the pope’s words and actions have, even if inadvertently, encouraged doctrinal error, or perhaps that the pope has been negligent in his duty to uphold sound doctrine.  It would be much harder to defend the pope against these milder charges, as the evidence adduced in the open letter clearly shows.  These milder charges also would not raise the question of the loss of the papal office, with all of its unresolved canonical and theological difficulties and horrific practical implications.  And it would also (unlike the prospect of a formally heretical pope) have clear precedents in the cases of Honorius and John XXII.
The Church famously teaches that the salvation of souls is the supreme law.  She does not teach that defending the pope at all costs is the supreme law.  Some of the pope’s defenders seem not to know the difference.  But as the precedents of St. Paul’s rebuke of St. Peter, the condemnation of Pope Honorius, and the 14th century theologians’ criticism of Pope John XXII all show – and as the Church herself has always acknowledged – it can happen, albeit very rarely, that what the salvation of souls requires is precisely the correction rather than defense of a pope.  The open letter is right about that too.  However, such correction must be carried out with filial reverence, and with extreme caution. 
Related posts:
The Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances
Papal fallibility
Why Archbishop Viganò is almost certainly telling the truth
Denial flows into the Tiber
How Pope Benedict XVI dealt with disagreement
Nudge nudge, wink wink

Review of Brague

My review of Rémi Brague’s new book Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age appears at Catholic Herald.  Links to other book reviews can be found at my main website.

Open the thread!

It’s your opportunity lawfully to indulge your impulse to make those off-topic comments I’m constantly having to delete.  Do so in good conscience, because nothing is really off-topic in this, the latest open thread.  From Donald Fagen to Ronald Reagan, from the Black Dahlia to papal regalia to inverted qualia – discuss whatever you like.  As always, just keep it classy and civil and free of trolling and troll-feeding.  Links to previous open threads can be found here.

Aristotelians ought to be presentists

Presentism holds that within the temporal domain, only the present exists and the past and future do not.  Alex Pruss thinks that Aristotelians shouldn’t be presentists.  That would be news to Aristotle, Aquinas, and other presentist Aristotelians.  I agree with them rather than with Alex, and I think that presentism is in fact the natural view to take if one starts with an Aristotelian view of the nature of physical reality, and of the nature of time in particular.  I spell all this out at length in Aristotle’s Revenge .  Here I will just try briefly to convey the general idea. Remember that change, for the Aristotelian, entails the actualization of potential.  For example, when a green banana ripens and turns yellow, the banana’s potential to be yellow is actualized, and when it later begins to rot and turns brown, its potential to be brown is actualized.  Now, time, for the Aristotelian, is just the measure of change with respect to succession.  When we say that it took a week for a banana to ripen and then rot, we are measuring the rate at which these changes succeeded one another.  Time thus piggybacks on change.  
Hence, the material world is a temporal world precisely because it is a changeable world.  For the Aristotelian, matter just is, fundamentally, the potentiality for form, and change is the actualization of that potentiality – matter’s taking on new forms which supplant the ones that had been there before.  Time actually passes only insofar as this supplanting occurs.  Because God is pure actuality without potentiality, his mode of existence is strictly eternal or timeless rather than temporal. 
Angels occupy a strange middle ground.  Because they are immaterial, angels are, unlike physical objects, imperishable.  They have no matter that can lose substantial form, which is what happens when a physical substance perishes.  So, being immaterial, they are not in time.  Still, angels, like us, have to be created, and they can exhibit something analogous to change of a mental sort.  Hence they are not eternal either.  This middle ground between temporality and eternity is called aeviternity.  
Now, suppose God creates a physical universe with only a single thing in it, an unripe green banana.  Suppose that he does so in such a way that its natural tendencies are miraculously suspended.  For example, it does not begin to ripen.  It is changeable, but its potentialities are not actualized, so that there is in fact no change.
For this reason, there is also no passage of time in this imagined world.  Hence there are no past or future events.  Is there a present?  Surely there is, because since this is a material world, we are not talking about eternity and we are not talking about aeviternity.  We are talking about the third alternative, a temporal world.  It’s just a world in which time has been suspended – precisely because change has been suspended – rather than being altogether atemporal.  It’s now in this world, even if what is now never becomes past.  It is for that reason a presentist world, since the present exists and past and future do not.
Now suppose instead that change is not suspended and the banana begins to ripen.  It goes from green to yellow.  What that means is that it has lost its greenness and gained yellowness, and that in turn boils down to its no longer being merely potentially yellow but instead actually yellow, and its no longer being actually green.  And if the process continues until the banana rots, the banana will eventually actualize its potential to be brown.  In this case we have the passage of time.  
While the banana is still yellow, though, does the future, brown state of the banana exist? Of course not, because the brownness is at this point still in the banana only potentially, not actually.  The future state of the banana no more exists in this scenario than it did on the first scenario, in which change was suspended.  There being change, and thus temporal passage, on this second scenario in no way suffices to make it true that future things and events exist.  They willexist, but until the potentialities are actualized, they do not.
But what about the past, such as the banana’s being green?  Does that exist after the banana has turned yellow?  How could it?  After the banana has turned yellow, its greenness is at that point no longer actual, any more than the brownness is actual.  Hence the greenness no more exists than the brownness does.  The greenness did exist, just as the brownness will exist.  But neither does exist.  The past, like the future, no more exists on this scenario than it did in the first scenario, in which change had been suspended.  So on this scenario too, we have a presentist world.  But the actual world is in all relevant respects like this second scenario.  It’s just that there are a lot more things in the actual world than a single banana.  So the actual world is a presentist world.
Now, so far I have left only implicit a further, key element of the Aristotelian view of time, and making it explicit will help make it clear where the illusion that past and future events exist comes from.  Remember that I said that time is the measure of change with respect to succession.  But whois doing the measuring?  The answer is that the mind does the measuring.  There is a sense, then, in which time is mind-dependent.  The qualifier “in a sense” is crucial, however, because the Aristotelian view of time is not an idealist one.
The best way to understand it is to think of it on analogy with the Aristotelian position on universals. For the Aristotelian, a universal like triangularity does not exist as a Platonic Form, in a third realm distinct from concrete individuals on the one hand and minds on the other.  It exists only as abstracted by the mind from concrete individual triangles.  At the same time, it is not a free creation of the mind.  Triangularity is really there in the concrete individual triangles, but just mixed in with their individualizing features, as it were, rather than existing there qua universal.  The Aristotelian view is not Platonist, but it is not nominalist either.
Now, where time is concerned, the Aristotelian rejects the idealist view that time is entirely a creation of the mind, just as he rejects the nominalist view that universals are free creations of the mind.  But neither does the Aristotelian accept the idea that time exists as a kind of substance in its own right, entirely apart from the world of changing things, as the Newtonian absolutist does.  That, for the Aristotelian, would be comparable to the Platonic error of regarding universals as substances in their own right, occupying their own distinctive realm.  To speak of time as if it existed entirely apart from change and apart from the minds that measure change is like speaking of triangularity as if it were a Platonic Form that existed entirely apart from all concrete individual triangles and all minds.
One thing that can happen when we start to Platonize time in this way is that we take the units in terms of which the mind measures change – seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, and so on – and we reify them.  For example, we start talking about last month, or about the year 1947, as if it were some entity that we have in some way moved past, and of next month, and the year 2047, as if they too were entities, but ones that we haven’t arrived at yet.  We concretize abstractions, as we do when we talk about the Form of Triangularity. 
This is exacerbated by the tendency in physics to confuse mathematical models of physical reality with physical reality itself.  Especially since space too tends in physics to be represented in a highly abstract mathematical way, the highly abstract mathematical representation of time that physics works with facilitates thinking of time as space-like, which further aggravates the tendency to think of all moments of time as in some way equally real.  From the Aristotelian point of view, these are all just variations on the same Platonizing error.  The B-theory of time, speculations about the possibility of time travel, and other exotica familiar from the contemporary philosophy of time literature have diverse philosophical motivations – including philosophical motivations disguised as scientific ones – but a major part of the story is this basic error (as the Aristotelian sees it) of reifying abstractions.  (Again, these points are all developed at length in Aristotle’s Revenge.)
Let me now turn, then, to Alex Pruss’s objection.  Alex writes:
A foundational commitment of Aristotelian philosophy is that all facts are grounded in what substances and features intrinsic to substances, namely forms and accidents, exist. But it is possible for the past to have been different without there being any difference in what substances and features intrinsic to substances presently exist. Therefore, the Aristotelian cannot equate present existence with existence.
In other words, Aristotelians cannot escape the standard grounding arguments against presentism.
End quote.  What he has in mind by “the standard grounding arguments against presentism” are arguments like the truthmaker objection and the objection from existence-entailing relations, which I have addressed in my recent exchanges with Bill Vallicella.
Now, Alex is right that the Aristotelian grounds facts in existing substances and features of substances.  But he errs in assuming that this thesis simply must be read in a way that would pose problems for the presentist.  That Aristotelians like Aristotle and Aquinas were themselves presentists should make that obvious enough.  There are facts about the White House and there are facts about the north tower of the old World Trade Center, whereas there are not, in the same sense, facts about Stark Tower (from the Marvel comics and movies).  The reason is that the White House does exist and the north tower of the World Trade Center didexist, whereas Stark Tower is purely fictional.  
What the Aristotelian thesis that Alex cites is intended to rule out are views that deny the ontologically fundamental status of substances, as well as idealism, relativism, and other views that might be taken to deny the reality of ordinary material substances.  Presentism fully respects such concerns.  Again, there really was a north tower of the old World Trade Center, even though it no longer exists.  We needn’t somehow translate that statement into a statement about what exists now, or what exists in some tenseless way, in order to capture the relevant point.  The fact that the tower didexist is sufficient to respect the Aristotelian concern to ground all facts in reality.  
Nothing more need be said, it seems to me, to reconcile the Aristotelian’s presentism with his concern to ground all facts in real substances and their features.  If someone has a problem with this reconciliation, I submit that it is not Aristotelianismthat is the source of the worry, but some other philosophical commitment.

Vallicella on existence-entailing relations and presentism

Bill Vallicella continues his critical response to my defense of presentism in Aristotle’s Revenge .  In the first part of his critique (to which I responded in an earlier post), Bill raised the influential “truthmaker objection” against presentism.  In his latest post, he rehearses another popular objection, which appeals to the nature of relations.  I don’t think this objection is any more formidable than the truthmaker objection, but here too Bill disagrees. The objection goes like this.  For at least some relations, it seems that both relata have to exist in order for the relation to hold.  For example, if I am standing next to you, the relation a is next to b holds of us precisely because you and I both exist.  Now a causes b seems to be that sort of relation as well.  Something non-existent can hardly cause anything, and if something has been caused, it too must exist. 
Now, presentism claims that within the temporal domain, only present objects and events exist.  (I say “within the temporal domain” because, as I noted in my earlier post, a presentist could hold that in addition to presently existing objects and events there are also things that exist in an eternal or aeviternal way.)  But then (so it is claimed) it seems we have a problem.  For suppose we say that Caesar’s assassination is among the things that have caused me to refer to it just now.  Caesar and his assassination, being past, do not exist.  So how can they be causally related to me?  Hence (it is concluded) presentism cannot account for such relations.
Many contemporary philosophers seem to regard this as a real chin-puller, but once again (and with nothing but respect for my good pal Bill) I find it difficult to stifle a yawn.  The reason is this.  From the commonsense point of view, and the Aristotelian point of view that systematizes it, causal and other relations don’t require that both relata exist now.  They just require that they exist at some time.  Hence, for Caesar’s assassination to be among the things that cause me to refer to it, it suffices that Caesar and his assassination didexist in the past, not that they nowexist.  
In his latest post, Bill objects:
But this is not the operative assumption. The operative assumption is simply that for an n-adic relation to hold between or among n relata, all the relata have to exist, period. They have to exist simpliciter; they don't have to exist now. 
End quote.  I do think Bill is missing the point.  For the claim that the relata “have to exist, period” or “have to exist simpliciter” is simply not one that the presentist would accept in the first place.  For where temporal phenomena are concerned, there just is no existence period or existence simpliciter in the “timeless” sense Bill seems to have in mind.  There is only what exists now, what used to exist but no longer does, and what will exist.  To insist that relations within the temporal realm must involve things that exist simpliciter (as opposed to existing now or being the sort of thing that used to exist) is simply to beg the question against presentism.
This should be even more obviously true of the example Bill himself actually uses, which is the relation a is earlier than b.  Does the truth of a proposition like Caesar’s assassination was earlier than Feser’s writing this blog post require that both events exist simpliciter?  Why on earth would a presentist agree with that assumption?  On the contrary, the presentist should say that a relation like a is earlier than b is precisely an Exhibit A case in which the items related do not exist at the same time.  In particular, it is a relation such that a had ceased to exist by the time b had come into existence. If the critic of presentism doesn’t like this way of talking, and insists that a and b must exist simpliciter, that is his problem, not the presentist’s.  The burden is on the critic to provide an argument for taking this insistence seriously.  It will not do for him to pretend that he has raised some devastating objection when the objection in fact rests on a question-begging assumption.
To be sure, Bill writes:
It is important to bear in mind that the presentist too must make use of the notion of existence simpliciter.  The thesis of presentism is not the logical truth that whatever exists (present-tense) exists now.  It is the thesis that whatever exists simpliciter exists now.  Equivalently: only present items exist simpliciter.  From this it follows that wholly past items such as the event of my having eaten lunch do not exist simpliciter. But then the objection is up and running.
End quote.  But the objection is not up and running, and again it seems to me that Bill is missing the point.  Yes, Caesar’s assassination does not now exist simpliciter (if one insists on talking that way).  But it did exist simpliciter at one time, and that is enough for it to bear a causal relation to me.
Bill says:
To fully savor the problem we cast it in the mold of an aporetic tetrad:
1. All genuine relations are either existence-entailing or existence-symmetric.
2. Earlier than is a genuine relation.
3. Presentism: only temporally present items exist.
4. Some events are earlier than others.
Each limb of the tetrad is exceedingly plausible.  But they cannot all be true:  any three, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining limb.  For example, the first three entail the negation of the fourth.  To solve the problem, we must reject one of the limbs.  
End quote.  Now, the trouble with this is that proposition 1 is ambiguous.  Both sides would agree that there is a sensein which the relations in question entail existence.  For example, both sides would agree that unicorns cannot cause anything, because they don’t exist and never did.  But the presentist would say that some relations (such as a is earlier than b, and a causes b) require only that the relata did exist at some time, whereas the critic of presentism insists that the relations require something else.  
Require what, exactly?  That the relata both exist now?  The critic of presentism will deny that that is what he is saying.  But what, then?  That one of the relata exists at one point in time and that the other exists at another point in time, where both points in time are equally real?  But if that is what the critic means, then he is begging the question against presentism, since the presentist denies that past and future points in time are real.  
What is going on with the objection from existence-entailing relations, I would argue, is that an essentially non-presentist conception of temporal existence is inadvertently smuggled in as if it were neutral ground on which both sides could formulate and debate the objection.  And it is a conception that is very far from a commonsense or Aristotelian way of understanding time.
Now, it is important to note that in Aristotle’s Revenge, I defend the commonsense/Aristotelian conception of time at some length before I ever get to recherché contemporary objections to presentism like the truthmaker objection and the objection from existence-entailing relations.  The reason is that I think these objections sound remotely plausible only if one has already gotten far away from common sense – for example, if one has started to think of time as if it were like space, so that past and future events are like distant spatial locations.  For only then does it start to seem intelligible that a past or future event might be said to exist even though it is not present.  
When a philosopher says, of something that exists in time (as opposed to eternally or aeviternally), “Sure, it doesn’t exist now, but does it exist simpliciter?”, I am inclined to channel Wittgenstein and say that language has gone on holiday.  We are no longer using “exists” in a way that reflects time as we ordinarily understand it.  Rather, we are using it in some highly theoretical sense that reflects a tendentious reconstruction of the notion of time.  (In fact, I would say, it reflects an abandonment of the notion of time and its replacement with some quasi-spatialized ersatz.)
That doesn’t by itself entail that that theoretical sense is wrong – though I certainly think it is – but it does mean that, since it is tendentious, it ought not to be put forward as if it were neutral ground on which to construct an aporia.  
Something similar is going on with the truthmaker objection.  From a commonsense presentist point of view, the “truthmaker” for the proposition that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March is the fact that Caesar really was assassinated on the Ides of March, and nothing more need be said.  There are facts about what was the case just as there are facts about what is the case.  Facts about what was the case will seem problematic only if one supposes that all facts must be of the same type, and describable in some timeless way – that is to say, only if one begs the question against presentism.
Part of what is going here, I would suggest, is that the critic of presentism is thinking, no doubt without realizing it, in a kind of Parmenidean way.  “There is just what is, full stop, and what is not, full stop!”  And Lesson 1 of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy is that that is a deep mistake, and the source of countless other mistakes.  Carving the territory up into “what is” and “what is not” (or what exists simpliciter and what does not) is too crude.  We need, for example, to recognize that between actuality and nothingness, there is potentiality, which is real even though it is not actual.  We need to see that in addition to what is, we can speak of what was and what will be.  We need to realize that notions like being, real, and existence are analogical, applied in related but still distinct senses to distinct kinds of thing.  And so forth.  Reality is simply more nuanced than the Parmenidean supposes.
Another factor, I think, is the prevalence of the time travel motif in contemporary pop culture.  Now, I love time travel stories and always have.  But metaphysically speaking, they are sheer incoherent nonsense (for reasons I set out at length in Aristotle’s Revenge).  They seem to work only if one doesn’t think too carefully about them.  The trouble is that a steady diet of this kind of stuff has given people muddleheaded views about time.  They start to think of past and future objects and events as if they are, or at least could be, “out there” somewhere, but just hard or impossible to reach.  In short, they start to think in an essentially “eternalist” way about time, without realizing it.  Then they hear an objection like the truthmaker objection or the objection from existence-entailing relations and think “Hmm, good point,” because they suppose it makes sense in the first place (as the presentist does not, or should not) to think that past and future events might exist to serve as relata or truthmakers.  
In fact, I would say, such objections can be seen to be non-starters when one approaches them from the point of view of the correct conception of the nature of time, which (I would argue) is the commonsense Aristotelian conception.  Hence, as I say, I defend that conception at considerable length in Aristotle’s Revenge before I discuss the contemporary objections in question.  
Longtime readers know that it is a recurring theme of my work that the standard moves made by contemporary philosophers where issues in natural theology, ethics, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and other areas of philosophy are concerned typically rest on presuppositions that Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers would reject, and ignore ideas that Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers would defend.  The same thing is true in the philosophy of time.  Here as elsewhere, getting things right requires getting outside the box in which the debate is usually conducted.

Vallicella on the truthmaker objection against presentism

Among the many ideas defended in Aristotle’s Revenge is the A-theory of time, and presentism in particular.  Relativity, time travel, the experience of time, and other issues in the philosophy of time are treated along the way, and what I say about those topics is crucial to my defense of presentism.  (See pp. 233-303.)  My buddy Bill Vallicella objects to my response in the book to the “truthmaker objection” against presentism.  Let’s consider Bill’s misgivings.
Presentism is the thesis that only the present exists, and that past and future events and objects do not.  To be more precise, it is the thesis that in the temporal realm, only present objects and events exist.  (For one could also hold – as I do, though other presentists might not – that in addition to what exists in time, there is what exists in an eternalor timeless way and what exists in an aeviternalway.)  Among the rivals of presentism is the “eternalist” view that past and future objects and events are as real as present ones.  There is also the “growing block” view, according to which past objects and events are as real as present ones, though future objects and events are not.
The truthmaker objection essentially goes like this.  If a statement is true, then there must be something that makes it true. For example, if it is true that the cat is on the mat, that must be because there really exists some cat on some particular mat.  Now, consider the statement that Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March.  This is true, so there must be some truthmaker that makes it true.  But it makes reference to a past event, and presentism holds that past events no longer exist.  So how can there be a truthmaker for this statement?
There has been a lot of heavy going about this objection in the literature, but I don’t think it is at all impressive.  That is not because I would deny the “truthmaker principle.”  On the contrary, I think it is not only true, but trivially so – so trivial that I don’t know that we really need a momentous label like “truthmaker principle,” which makes it sound more substantive and interesting than it really is.
Yes, a statement is true only if there is something that makes it true.  But that doesn’t tell us very much, because there are so many kinds of thing that might make a statement true.  The statement that the cat is on the mat is true because of facts about the existence of and relationship between two spatiotemporal objects.  But different sorts of statements will have very different sorts of “truthmakers.”  For example, the statement that Iron Man is really Tony Stark is true.  But that is not because of facts similar to those that make it true that the cat is on the mat, because unlike cats and mats, Tony Stark is a fictional character.  So, what makes that sort of statement true has to do with the way certain people happened to write certain works of fiction.
Or take the statement that you can apologize to someone by sincerely uttering the words “I apologize.”  What makes that statement true is not any sort of spatial relationship between physical objects and not any sorts of facts about how certain fictional stories were written, but rather facts about certain human social conventions.  That’s a very different sort of “truthmaker.”
Or take the statement that 2 + 2 = 4.  What makes that sort of statement true has to do, not with spatiotemporal relations between physical objects, or with how a certain work of fiction was written, or with human conventions, but rather with the necessary connections between certain concepts.  (And what does that involve exactly?  Good question, but however we answer it, it will not be like the other examples, and the “truthmaker principle” by itself will be pretty useless for helping us to answer it.)
There are other possible examples, such as statements about God, statements about angels, statements about possible but non-actual states of affairs, and statements about impossible objects (e.g. “There are no round squares”).  Each will have a “truthmaker,” but not the same kind of truthmaker as in the other examples. 
So, the “truthmaker principle” doesn’t really tell us much.  In particular, it doesn’t tell us what sorts of things would have to make statements about the past true.  It certainly doesn’t tell us that the truthmakers for statements about the past have to be like the truthmakers for statements about the present, any more than it tells us that the truthmakers for statements about Tony Stark, or about the conditions for an apology, or about arithmetic, or about the impossibility of round squares, have to be like the truthmakers for statements about cats and mats.
Hence, for all the truthmaker principle tells us, it may be that what makes it true that Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March is simply the fact that Caesar really was assassinated on the Ides of March.  It doesn’t tell us that the truthmaker has to be a fact about something that exists, as opposed to being a fact about something that used to exist.  The presentist can say that as long as it is the case that Caesar etc. are things that used to exist even though they don’t exist anymore, then we have a “truthmaker” for the statement.
Of course, the critic of presentism might object to this on various grounds.  For example, he might insist that past events do in fact exist no less than present ones do, and that the existence of these past events is a more plausible candidate for being a truthmaker for the statement that Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March than the presentist’s proposed candidate is.  But if that is how he develops the “truthmaker” objection, then he is simply begging the question against the presentist.  For of course, the presentist would deny that past events exist.
Alternatively, the critic of presentism might avoid begging the question, and try to develop some other sort of response.  He will no doubt say that there is something fishy about the idea of a fact that something used to exist.  How can there now be a fact about something that is no longer real?  If he is going to do that, though, then he might as well also say that there is something fishy about the idea of facts about fictional stories, or human conventions, or abstract entities, or possibilities, or round squares, or what have you.
But in that case, it is clear that it isn’t really the “truthmaker principle” per se that is doing the work in the so-called “truthmaker objection” to presentism.  Rather, it is some other sort of ontological concern, such as a concern about the nature of facts.  “Truthmaking” by itself is simply too vague a notion to do any serious metaphysical work.
So, as I say, I don’t think the “truthmaker objection” is very impressive or interesting.  Bill disagrees.  He asks us to consider the following propositions:
(1) There are contingent past-tensed truths.
(2) Past-tensed truths are true at present.
(3) Truth-Maker Principle: contingent truths need truth-makers.
(4) Presentism: Only (temporally) present items exist.
The problem, Bill says, is that “the limbs of this aporetic tetrad, although individually plausible, appear to be collectively inconsistent.”
But I would deny that there is any inconsistency.  There is a presently existing fact that serves as the truthmaker for past-tensed truths such as the truth that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March – namely, the fact that Caesar really was assassinated on the Ides of March.  To be sure, Caesar no longer exists and his assassination is no longer taking place.  But the fact that he was assassinated on the Ides of March still exists.  
To get an inconsistency, Bill would have to add to the list some further claim like:
(5) Only facts about what does exist (as opposed to facts about what used toexist) can serve as truthmakers.
But that would simply beg the question against the presentist.  And of course the presentist would say: “There will be no inconsistency if you get rid of (5).  ‘Problem’ solved!”
Bill also objects:
Feser seems to be proposing the following. In the case of the present-tensed 'BV exists,' the truth-maker is BV. But when BV is no more and it is true that BV existed, the truth-maker of the past-tensed truth will be the fact that BV existed and will not involve BV himself.
As it seems to me, this proposal betrays a failure to appreciate the difference between a fact construed as a true proposition, and a truth-maker, which cannot be a (Fregean or abstract) proposition. A truth-bearer cannot serve as a truth-maker. On one common use of 'fact,' a fact is just a true (abstract) proposition. We may refer to such facts as facts that. A fact that cannot serve as a truth-maker. Facts that need truth-makers.
End quote.  In response, I would say that it is a mistake to identify facts with propositions.  There is the fact that I am sitting in front of my computer, and there is the proposition that I am sitting in front of my computer.  The first makes the second true, but it is not identical with the second.  So there is no question here of the truth-bearer (namely the proposition) serving as a truth-maker (it is the fact, not the proposition, that is serving as a truth-maker).  
Similarly, it is the fact that Caesar used to exist and was assassinated on the Ides of March that makes true the proposition that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March.  The fact is not the truth-bearer; the proposition is.  The fact is precisely the truth-maker.  
Bill also criticizes a remark in my book to the effect that “the past and future don't have the same kind of reality that the present does” (p. 301).  He objects that:
[O]n standard presentism, there is no distinction between kinds of reality. The claim is not that the wholly past and the wholly future have a different kind of reality or existence than the present, but that the past and future are not real or existent at all. On presentism, what no longer exists, does not exist at all. It passes out existence entirely; it does not retain a lesser kind of existence or exist in a looser sense of 'exist.'  
End quote.  This is true, and I will concede that my remark was phrased in a way that is potentially misleading if read out of context.  But strictly speaking, what I wrote is correct.  The past and future indeed don’t have the same kind of reality that the present does, precisely because they don’t have reality at all.  (I think Bill is here making too much of an awkwardly worded phrase.  As Bill himself acknowledges, I do make it clear elsewhere in my discussion that presentism denies that past and future objects and events exist at all.)
The point I was trying to make, in any event, is that past objects and events were real (unlike fictional objects and events, which never were).  That fact is what serves as the truthmaker for statements about past objects and events.  Statements about present objects and events have as their truthmakers a different sort of fact, viz. facts about objects and events that arereal.  
Bill also writes:
I conclude that Feser hasn't appreciated the depth of the grounding problem. 'Caesar was assassinated' needs an existing truth-maker. But on presentism, neither Caesar nor his being assassinated exists. It is not just that these two items don't exist now; on presentism, they don't exist at all. What then makes the past-tensed sentence true?  This is the question that Feser hasn't satisfactorily answered.
End quote.  In fact I have answered it.  Yes, “Caesar was assassinated” needs an existing truthmaker.  And that truthmaker is not Caesar or his assassination (neither of which exist anymore) but the fact that he was assassinated (which does still exist – after all, it is as much a fact now as it was yesterday, and will remain a fact tomorrow).  To this Bill objects that “obviously this won't do [because] the past-tensed truth cannot serve as [its] own truth-maker.”  But again, this conflates facts with propositions, and these should not be conflated. 
The critic might respond: “But facts don’t ‘exist’ in the same way that tables, chairs, etc. do!”  To which I would reply that that is perfectly true, but that there are also lots of other things that don’t exist in the same way that tables, chairs, etc. do – numbers, propositions, possibilities, God, and so on.  So what?  “Exists” is not a univocal term but an analogical one.  If the critic thinks that every truthmaker must exist in exactly the same way, then, once again, his objection does not really rest on the “truthmaker principle” per se but on some other ontological concern.
One further point.  Even if the defender of the “truthmaker objection” could get around the criticisms I have been raising, the objection nevertheless will succeed only if some alternative to presentism is correct.  And as I argue in Aristotle’s Revenge, none of the alternatives is correct.  So it will not suffice for the critic merely to try to raise problems for the presentist’s understanding of truth-making.  He will also have to defend some non-presentist understanding of truth-making, which will require responding to the objections I’ve raised against the rivals to presentism.
In particular, the critic presupposes that we have a clear idea of what it would be for past objects and events and future objects and events to be no less real than the present is, and thus a clear idea of what it would be for such things to be truthmakers.  But I claim that that is an illusion.  The eternalist view is in fact not well-defined.  It is a tissue of confusions that presupposes errors such as a tendency to characterize time in terms that intelligibly apply only to space, and to mistake mathematical abstractions for concrete realities.  Indeed, on the Aristotelian view of time that I defend in the book, the approaches to the subject commonly taken by various contemporary writers are in several respects wrongheaded.  Again, what I say about the truthmaker objection must be read in light of the larger discussion of time in Aristotle’s Revenge.

Review of a new volume on Neo-Scholasticism

My review of Rajesh Heynickx and Stéphane Symons’ anthology So What's New About Scholasticism? How Neo-Thomism Helped Shape the Twentieth Century appears at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Links to other book reviews can be found at my main website.

Can you doubt that 2 + 3 = 5?

In his first Meditation, Descartes famously tries to push doubt as far as he can, in the hope of finding something that cannotbe doubted and will thus provide a suitable foundation for the reconstruction of human knowledge.  Given the possibility that he is dreaming or that an evil spirit might be causing him to hallucinate, he judges that whatever the senses tell him might in principle be false.  In particular, the entire material world, including even his own body and brain, might be illusory.  Hence claims about the material world, and empirical claims in general, cannot in Descartes’ view be among the foundations of knowledge. Surprisingly for a rationalist, Descartes also suggests that even claims about basic arithmetic cannot be among the foundations.  For he proposes that it is possible that God might make him go wrong when considering even something as elementary as the claim that 2 + 3 = 5 or the claim that a square has four sides.  By the end of the first Meditation, he alters the scenario so that it is the evil spirit or Cartesian demon rather than God who is doing the deceiving, and later in the Meditations he argues that given God’s perfect goodness, he cannot be leading us astray in any way.  The key point for present purposes, though, is that Descartes does suggest, at least initially, that it is as coherent to doubt basic arithmetical and geometrical claims as it is to doubt that one is awake or that matter exists.  Is this true?
I think not.  The way Descartes’ skeptical scenarios work is by proposing coherent alternatives – or purportedly coherent ones, anyway – to the way things appear to common sense.  For example, given the experiences you are having right now, your common sense assumption would be that you are looking at a computer screen reading a blog post.  However, there are, Descartes says, clearly possible alternative scenarios in which you are not really looking at a computer screen and reading a blog post at all.  You could instead be in bed asleep and having a vivid dream about reading a blog post on a computer.  Or you could be a disembodied spirit who is being caused by a Cartesian demon to hallucinate that you have a body that is sitting in front of a computer reading a blog post.
Put to one side for present purposes the question whether these particular scenarios really are, at the end of the day, coherent.  (Some philosophers have argued that they are not.)   They are at least prima facie plausible insofar as we are familiar enough with dreams and hallucinations.  It is possible to have a dream in which one is convinced one is awake and looking at a computer screen.  It is possible to hallucinate.  Hence it certainly seems like we have cases where things appear to be some way X but are really some other way Y.  To be sure, one can (and should) question whether it is coherent to suppose that one is always dreaming or hallucinating, or whether a sensory experience of precisely the kind I am having right now could really be a dream or hallucination.  But dreams and hallucinations are familiar enough that these particular skeptical arguments at least get off the ground, even if we can ultimately shoot them back down.
By contrast, it is not clear how skepticism about basic arithmetic can even get off the ground.  For what we need is a coherent scenario in which it seems that (say) 2 + 3 = 5 but in reality the arithmetical facts are very different.  For example, we need a coherent scenario in which 2 + 3 = 14 but God or the demon is making it seem otherwise.  And the problem is that there is no such coherent scenario.  We simply cannot coherently describe a case in which 2 and 3 really add up to 14, the way we can (arguably) coherently describe a case in which you are not really reading a blog post on a computer right now.  For 2 and 3 adding up to 14 is a logical impossibility, whereas your not really reading a blog post on a computer right now is not a logical impossibility.  The proposition that 2 + 3 = 14 entails contradictions, whereas the proposition that I am not really reading a blog post on a computer right now does not.
You might respond: “But maybe God or the demon is only making it seem to you to be a logical impossibility.”  But that won’t work, for the same reason the original scenario won’t work.  For now we need to be able to describe a scenario in which the proposition that it is logically possible that 2 + 3 = 14is itself logically possible (and either God or the demon is only making it seem otherwise).  And the problem is that that proposition is no more logically possible than the first one is. 
There is, then, a crucial disanalogy between the examples involving arithmetic and the examples involving physical objects.  We can, independently of what we know about dreams and hallucinations, make sense of a scenario in which a certain physical object is not present.  (There are, after all, a great many places devoid of computer screens and blog posts – my back yard, the surface of the moon, the bottom of the Mariana Trench, etc.)  Hence we can go on to contrast a dream or hallucination in which the object does at least seem to be present with the fact that it is not.  But we cannot independently make sense of a scenario in which (say) 2 + 3 = 14.  Hence we have nothing to contrast with a scenario in which God or the demon makes it seem as if 2 and 3 add up to something other than 14.  We can’t really get the skeptical scenario going, the way we can with skeptical arguments involving dreams and hallucinations about the physical world.
So, it seems that, even if Descartes were correct to regard skepticism about the senses and the material world as coherent, he should not have regarded skepticism about basic arithmetic and the like as coherent.  That is significant for the rest of his project in the Meditations.  It has often been pointed out that, given the latter sort of skepticism, Descartes arguably shoots himself in the foot, making it impossible for him to get beyond the Cogito and maybe even impossible to get as far as the Cogito.  For if I could be wrong even about something as seemingly self-evident as 2 + 3 = 5, why couldn’t I be wrong about something like Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”)?  Or, even if I can’t be wrong about that, I still need to carry out some fairly complex reasoning to get from knowledge of my own existence to knowledge of God’s existence (as Descartes does later in the Meditations, before going on to appeal to God’s goodness as guarantor of the reliability of his rational faculties).  And how can I be sure that I haven’t gone wrong somewhere in that reasoning, if I can be wrong about something as basic as 2 + 3 = 5?
It is a good thing for Descartes’ overall project, then, that the doubts raised in the first Meditation vis-à-vis basic arithmetic and the like are misplaced.  (That’s not to say the project isn’t wrongheaded in other ways – it is – but at least this bit of it can be patched up.)
Further reading:
Descartes’ “trademark” argument
Descartes’ “preservation” argument
Descartes’ “clear and distinct perception” argument
Descartes’ “indivisibility” argument