nicely with PEP. PEP recognizes a plurality of ways to be, and adverbialism recog-
nizes a plurality of ways to have a property. There might even be a deeper reason for
thinking these viewsfit nicely together. As I mentioned in section 3.4, it is tempting
to think that present existence is a 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 is why past existence is a degenerate way to exist: things whose sole
mode of being is past existence do not exist in themselves but only relative to a
moment. The only kind of existence Julius Caesar enjoys is existence at some times or
others, whereas present things just plain exist. It would be natural to supplement this
view with the idea that, just as there are two ways to exist, there are ultimately two
sorts of ways to have a property: to have-at-some-time the property, or to just plain
have the property. Only presently existing things can just plain have properties,
whereas pastly existing things merely have-at-times properties.^58 Intuitively, having-
relative-to-something-or-other a property is a less respectable way to have a property
than just plain having it. On this view, we needn’t say that most predicates applicable
to temporal beings are analogous. We do need to say that the“is”of predication is
analogous, but perhaps we should say this anyways on independent grounds.
On this view, some past objects might be intrinsic duplicates of some presently
existing objects, even if they differ in how they have their properties. (It is possible
that there is a past object that exists at a timetand a present object such that for every
intrinsic property F, that past object has-at-tF if and only if the present object just
plain has F.) Past objects are not shorn of properties, although they do have-at-times
these properties. And truths about the past are still appropriately grounded: for
example, propositions of the form“W(Fx)”are entailed by propositions of the
form“ (^9) pt(tis a time andx-has-at-tF”).
Let’s turn to a discussion of what I will call theHybrid view, which is inspired by
Solomyak (2013). I’llfirst briefly summarize the relevant aspects of this paper before
articulating the Hybrid view. Solomyak (2013) defends a version of ontological
pluralism in which actual entities enjoy a mode of being not enjoyed by merely
possible entities. According to Solomyak, there are two perspectives one can take on
reality, an actualist perspective according to which the actual world is the only world
that there is and in which properties are not had relative to worlds, and an amodal
perspective according to which the actual world is merely one world among many,
and in which“properties”are really relations to worlds. On Solomyak’s view, there is
no ultimate fact as to which perspective one should adopt: each mode of being is
equally fundamental and neither is dispensable.
relates objects, properties, and times. With the exception of that commitment, the views seem to me to be
indistinguishable, and so I will conflate them in what follows.
(^58) This needn’t mean that every property had by a presently existing object is just-plain-had, but some
such property must be.