Jerzy Gołosz

Th author submits to a critical analysis the argument of the hole, which has been formulated by Einstein and later developed by Earman and Norton. The aim of the analysis is an evaluation of the assumption made in the argument and the possibility of avoiding its indeterministic consequences. It turns out that it is a particular form of substantivalism assumed by Earman and Norton which is responsible for the indeterministic consequences of the argument. It follows that those consequences can be avoided by rejecting either substantivalism as a whole or its particular form accepted by both authors. None of the non-substantivalist interpretations proposed can be accepted, including also the one that Earman himself has tried to develop. The presented forms of the structural substantivalism and the substantivalism rejecting the transworld identification of points are hardly aceptable, either. Hence, there are two alternatives left: either one of the versions of essentialism or else instrumentalism, i.e. giving up doing ontology. Since the author regards instrumentalism as cognitively fruitless, he prefers the first option

Presentism faces the following well-known dilemma: either the truth-value of past-tense claims depends on the non-existing past and cannot be said to supevene on being, or it supervenes on present reality and breaks our intuition which says that the true past-tense claims should not depend on any present aspect of reality. The paper shows that the solution to the dilemma offered by Kierland and Monton’s brute past presentism, the version of presentism according to which the past is supposed to be both a fundamental and present aspect of reality, is implausible and proposes how to cure presentism: the dillema can be avoided by taking a third road consisting of introducing dynamics into presentism in the form of the real passage of time. Dynamic presentism, which is constructed in such a way, can overcome the dilemma by providing an ontological basis for the past-tense propositions in the form of the real past. Dynamic presentism also offers a rationale for treating the future as being open.