Here is a suggestion that seems to do the trick.^22 Corresponding to the present
moment is a unique way of being. Additionally, corresponding to every temporal
interval centered on the present moment is a unique way of being. (So there is a way
of being corresponding to the interval beginning one second before the present
moment and ending one second after the present moment, there is a way of being
corresponding to the interval beginning one hour before the present moment and
ending one hour after the present moment, and so forth.) On this suggestion, things
enjoy more than one way of existing. We now definex has a higher level of being than
yas: the set of ways of being enjoyed byyis apropersubset of the set of ways of being
enjoyed byx.^23 On this account, things that presently exist have“more being”than
things that do not, and the further an existent is from the present, the“less being”it
has: a thing that existsin more waysthan others has a richerexistential profileand
henceenjoys, in this sense,more being.^24 In order to keep the terminology consistent,
I will henceforth use only“level of being”when describing this sort of ontological
difference between entities.
We’ve described a version of Degrees Presentism in which the“degrees”are
understood in terms of levels of being. It is hard to see what theoretical advantages
it has over PEP. And there are theoretical costs: Degrees Presentism, as understood
above, posits literally infinitely many modes of existence: in effect, it is Meinongian
presentism with infinitely many fundamental inner quantifiers.^25 Standard Meinongian
presentism and PEP posit only two fundamental quantifiers.
Smith’s (2002: 119–20) main motivation for Degrees Presentism isphenomeno-
logical: he holds that what he calls degrees of existence are given in experience, and
that it is obvious that Degrees Presentism is true. I am not unsympathetic to the
phenomenological motivation for ontological pluralism. However, in this case,
I don’t think that Smith has correctly described the phenomenology. It doesn’t
seem to me that it is given in experience that Socrates is less real than Aristotle.
Which experiences did I have in which this fact was given? What does seem true is
that, as events recede in time, our memories of them often become less vivid and
vivacious. But this is not always the case: my memories of the births of my daughters
are more vivid and vivacious than my memories of what I did two days ago. Both kids
(^22) Thanks to Jason Turner for the suggestion.
(^23) An even more general proposal but in the same spirit is to define“xhas a higher level* of being thany”as
“let Cxbe the class of ways in whichxexists; let Cybe the class of ways in whichyexists; then: the cardinality of
Cxis greater than the cardinality of Cy.”However, given standard assumptions about the continuity of time,
the cardinality of many of these sets will be the same even when some of them are proper subsets of others of
them. Thanks to an anonymous referee for discussion here. 24
Or, at least, it exists in all the ways in which less present things exist, and in some in which they do
not. In this context, talk of 25 “more ways”might be misleading.
I’m confident that this is a cost of Degrees Presentism so interpreted, but I’m not sure how much of a
cost it is. Each of the quantifiers posited by Degrees Presentism is, in a sense, of the same ideological kind,
and perhaps it is more important to count kinds here rather than members of a kind. But there are
infinitely many members of this ideological kind given Degrees Presentism. See Cowling (2013b) for
discussion of ideological parsimony. Thanks to Peter Finocchiaro for pushing me here.