Jerzy Gołosz

The paper examines the relations between presentism and the thesis concerning the existence of the flow of time. It tries to show that the presentist has to admit the existence of the passage of time and that the standard formulation of presentism as a singular thesis saying that only the present exists is insufficient because it does not allow the inference of the existence of the passage of time. Instead of this, the paper proposes a formulation of presentism with the aid of the notion of becoming; not only does a formulation state the existence of the flow of time in such a way as to avoid the question of the rate of the passage of time, it also allows the inference of the existence of only present things and events. The paper demonstrates that the proposed conception of presentism also has other virtues, such as homogeneity, non-triviality, and ability to express dynamicity of presentists’ image of the world which testify for it.

The paper consists of two parts. The first critically analyses Meyer’s [2005] version of the triviality objection to presentism (according to which, presentism is either trivial or untenable), and tries to show that his argument is untenable because – contrary to what he claimed – he did not take into account the entire possible spectrum of interpretations of the presentist’s thesis. In the second, positive part of the paper, it is shown that a leading form of tensed theory of time postulates the same ontology as presentism and that it avoids the triviality problem which means that it can be used to generate an alternative formulation of presentism which is no longer vulnerable to the triviality objection.