This hybrid talk will take place in Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus)
and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to
events.isfi@usi.ch.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
There are varieties of realism about tense. Kit Fine (“Tense and Reality”, 2005 and “The Reality of Tense”, 2006) offers a helpful taxonomy. In our paper “Eternal Facts in an Ageing Universe” (2012), we improve upon this taxonomy, identifying a further type
of view that Fine: Dynamic Absolutism. Both these taxonomies construe the different versions of tense realism in terms of first-order quantification over facts or states of affairs. Our goal is to show that the logical space of these first-order tense-realist
positions can be replicated using higher-order quantification instead: there are matching varieties of higher-order tense realism. Along the way, we rebut an argument given by Lukas Skiba in his “Higher-Order Being and Time” (2025) to the effect that there
is no coherent higher-order version of Dynamic Absolutism.