The Fragmentation of Being

that are not. If we understand“degree of existence”in my way and Smith’s degree
presentism is true, it follows that all facts about past and present objects arefixed by
facts about the present. Whether this is the case though is highly controversial, and is
a large part of what lies behind the truth-maker objection to presentism, which
I discuss in section 3.5.
So let’s see whether some other notion in the neighborhood of what I call degrees
of existence can be understood in terms ofmodes of existenceand (perhaps) other
concepts. Smith (2002) seems to take his notion of degrees of existence as a primitive.
I have no objection to this, provided that we can characterize (not define!) this
primitive in such a way as to distinguish it from other notions in its neighborhood
with which it might be confused. In the introduction, I distinguished between what
I called orders of being, levels of being, and degrees of being. For me, each of these
notions is important, and importantly different.
We’ve already encountered orders of being in sections 2.4–2.4.3. There is some-
thing to be said for the idea that substances enjoymorereality than attributes. In
general, it seems right to say that things that existabsolutelyhave in some sense more
being than those that existrelatively:xhas a higher order of being thany= df. The
logical form of the kind of existence enjoyed byxisless polyadicthan the kind of
existence enjoyed byy.
The notion does have an interesting possible application to the philosophy of time.
Consider the view that present existence is the only kind of absolute existence,
whereas things that exist in the past enjoy only a kind of relative existence, specifically
existence relative to a time. This view implies that past existence is a deficient mode
of existence: past existence is a lower order of being. However, on this view, past
existence is still a fundamental (yet relative) mode of being, and hence there is no
expectation that all facts about past existents must befixed by facts about the present.
That said, orders of being do not seem to be what Smith has in mind. For on the
view I’ve just described, it doesn’t follow that, as you recede further into the past, your
mode of being proportionately deteriorates. There is no obvious way of appealing to
orders of being to achieve the result Smith wants.
From the perspective of Degrees Presentism, PEP itself is a kind of“degrees
presentism,”albeit one that recognizes only two“degrees”of being and that does
not explicitly state thatpresently existingis a greater degree. Similar remarks apply to
Meinongian presentism, although since for the Meinongian presentist present
objects enjoy two modes of being, perhaps it is clearer how present existence is
superior to past existence. This suggests that one way of modeling Degrees Present-
ism is to hold that, for each time, there is a unique way of being corresponding
to that time. One could then claim that there is a primitive relation ordering the
ways of being, which is formally analogous to thegreater than relationand which
has the way of being corresponding to the present moment at its apex. But it is
hard to see why this relation, despite its formal character, really correlates with
“amounts of being.”

WAYS OF BEING AND TIME 