Yazan Freij

In this essay, I show that perceptual presentness supports the existence of a global present if we adopt a speculative realist approach to phenomenology. I show how this global present can resist the argument from special relativity. The idea is that the concept of the global present is derived from our perceptual experience of the local present, and I show that special relativity does not undermine this concept; what it undermines instead is that there are specific events or objects that are globally present. The resulting view is a form of phenomenological fragmentalism that is analogous to Kit Fine’s ontological fragmentalism.

Recent approaches to quantum gravity suggest that spacetime is not a fundamental entity but rather emerges from a non-spatiotemporal structure. To conceptualise how spacetime might emerge, it has been suggested that we should think of spacetime as being mereologically composed of spacetime regions which are in turn composed of non- spatiotemporal parts. However, Baron (2021) has argued that even if spacetime composition can be shown to be coherent, it would still be different from how we ordinarily conceive the mereology of concrete objects, and thus spacetime composition is unfamiliar. In this paper, I argue that this argument rests on the false premise that our intuitions apply equally to all domains. I then reformulate four principles that are taken to be intuitive for mereological composition. In their original formulations, these principles are violated by spacetime composition. But once reformulated, the tension with spacetime composition dissolves. I also show that these reformulations still satisfy our intuitions in the domain of everyday life but also extend beyond it into other domains. As a result, I maintain that spacetime composition is at least somewhat familiar with potential that its familiarity will grow in the future. Therefore, there is no reason to reject it as unfamiliar.

In this paper, I take two recent arguments in the literature against naturalistic metaphysics, that is, a metaphysics guided by our best science, and show that these arguments should be directed instead against metaphysical realism, which is roughly the view that our metaphysics aims to provide a unique and true account of the world out there. The first argument is the argument from progress which states that since metaphysical theories are not quantitative like scientific theories, they cannot inherit the progress from the scientific theories they are based upon. The second argument is the argument from metaphysical underdetermination which states that each scientific theory can be compatible with many metaphysical theories with no way to choose the true theory among them. These two arguments undermine metaphysical realism. As a result, I conclude that we ought to adopt instead a form of antirealistic metaphysics.

ABSTRACT This article develops a phenomenological account to characterize the openness of the future. More specifically, showing that phenomenological experience is necessary to derive the belief that the future is open by adopting a realist reading of phenomenology where our experience can be used to speculate beyond the thought-world correlation postulated by Quentin Meillassoux and show that this openness is best captured as an indeterminacy of the future itself. This indeterminacy of the future is the indeterminacy of which events are actualized or made to happen out of all the potential events. Here, our phenomenological experience allows us to feel what it is like to have the ability to participate in an event and make it happen. We can then generalize such ability to all other objects even inanimate ones. As a result, we have a phenomenological but non-anthropocentric account of the openness of the future.