Giuliano Torrengo

The Metaphysics of the Thin Red Line

The thin red line is the view that time branches towards the future, but future contingent has already in the present a determinate truth-value. On the face of it, such a view avoids determinism and fatalism, while also representing the fact that there is a future which is ‘special’ because it is the one that will be the case. However, many have objected to the tenability of the thin red line theory by arguing that either it collapses on linear time or it compels us to endorse thick metaphysical theses about the future. In this chapter, we argue against such attacks and show that TRL’s metaphysical grounds are solid.

The grounding problem and presentist explanations

Opponents of presentism have often argued that the presentist has difficulty in accounting for what makes (presently) true past-tensed propositions (TptP) true in a way that is compatible with her metaphysical view of time and reality. The problem is quite general and concerns not only strong truth-maker principles, but also the requirement that truth be grounded in reality. In order to meet the challenge, presentists have proposed many peculiar present aspects of the world as grounds for truths concerning the past, such as uninstantiated haecceities, Meinongian non-existents, ersatz times, and dispositional and distributional properties. The main problem with all such solutions is that any explanation of what grounds a TptP that involves the past is eo ipso a better explanation than any that involves only the present. Thus, the quest for an account of grounding for TptP that is compatible with the presentist ontology and ideology is doomed to be explanatorily deficient with respect to eternalism. In a recent article, Ben Caplan and David Sanson have claimed that presentists should change their strategy and, rather than seeking for exotic grounds for TptP, should adopt a more liberal view of explanation. That is, they should allow themselves to resort to “past directed” explanations, even if they do not accept the past in their ontology and ideology. I argue that such a proposal is not compatible with the tenet that there is a substantial distinction between the ideology of such a version of presentism and that of eternalism. Therefore, the presentist cannot endorse such “deflationist” explanations as an easy way out to the problem of the grounding of TptP.

Hyper-Russellian Skepticism

Abstract The hyper-Russellian skeptic is someone who thinks that only one of all your experiences was, is, and will ever be conscious. Which one? The very one you are having now. Before you were always a zombie, and you will be a zombie for ever after. In the present literature on the metaphysics of passage of time, there is disagreement on whether our feeling that time passes — the “dynamic flavor” of our ordinary experience — provides support to the A-theory, that is, the thesis that the passage of time is an objective feature of reality. Lately, several philosophers have argued against this idea. In this paper I want to push this line of reasoning further by exploiting the hyper-Russellian scenario against the A-theory of time.

The Worst and the Best of Propaganda

Abstract In this paper we discuss two issues addressed by Jason Stanley in How Propaganda Works: the status of slurs (Section 1) and the notion of positive propaganda (Section 2). In particular, in Section 1 we argue contra Stanley that code words like ‘welfare’ are crucially different from slurs in that the association between the lexical item and an additional social meaning is not as systematic as it is for slurs. In this sense, slurs bring about a special kind of propagandistic effect, even if it typically concerns informal contexts rather than public debates. In Section 2, we consider positive propaganda and its relation to emotional effects. For Stanley, positive propaganda relies on the production of emotional effects, feature which risks to erode rational debates even if there is a good purpose behind. Instead, we argue that positive propaganda can work with no appeal to emotions. To this end, we focus on the use of ‘she’ as the default personal pronoun in academic writing and suggest that this measure can count as positive propaganda which rather than eroding rational debates by relying on emotional effects, closely resembles affirmative action aimed at counterbalancing a pre-existing form of injustice and inequality.

Time travel and coincidence-free local dynamical theories

I criticize Lockwood’s solution to the “paradoxes” of time travel, thus endorsing Lewis’s more conservative position. Lockwood argues that only in the context of a 5D space-time-actuality manifold is the possibility of time travel compatible with the Autonomy Principle (according to which global constraints cannot override what is physically possible locally). I argue that shifting from 4D space-time to 5D space-time-actuality does not change the situation with respect to the Autonomy Principle, since the shift does not allow us to have a coincidence-free local dynamical theory.

Dalla Fiat al web. Che cosa una ontologia sociale basata sui documenti permette di spiegare

Nel 2009, prendendo le mosse da articoli e libri pubblicati negli anni precedenti, Maurizio Ferraris proponeva la “documentalita”, una ontologia sociale che, a differenza della received view basata sull’intenzionalita collettiva, individuava il fondamento degli oggetti sociali negli atti iscritti. Prendendo come spunto due oggetti sociali tipicamente torinesi – il capoluogo piemontese e il luogo di nascita del filosofo – e cioe la casa automobilistica Fiat e l’Universita di Torino, in questo breve saggio si discutono alcune tra le tesi che caratterizzano una ontologia sociale siffatta. Particolare attenzione viene data alla tesi secondo cui l’identita di un oggetto sociale e la sua permanenza attraverso il tempo dipenderebbero dall’iscrizione che ne e alla base anziche, come per esempio nella posizione searliana, dall’oggetto fisico sottostante. Questa tesi, si sostiene, acquisisce particolare pregnanza nell’epoca del web, quell’acceleratore della documentalita, per dirla con le parole del filosofo, che ha la caratteristica di mostrare nella sua evidenza la struttura stessa della realta sociale e, in tal modo, di diventare uno strumento per il cambiamento. Mettendo in luce la linea concettuale che unisce Documentalita (2009) con uno dei lavori piu recenti di Ferraris, Mobilitazione totale (2015), si articola e si sostiene l’idea secondo cui il web svolge una duplice funzione. Da un lato, rivelare l’emergere della societa dalla natura, riproducendo in tempi osservabili e in un ambiente monitorabile, quello di cui non e possibile essere spettatori diretti. Dall’altro, renderne evidente la struttura ultima che, appunto, e una struttura documentale.

2.3. «Esistere» ed «essere esistito»

What do “existing” and “having existed” mean? The answer to this question depends radically on the metaphysical assumption that we are making about the nature of time. If we take the present to be privileged over other times, then “having existed” is bound to express a notion close to non-existence. If we think that the present has no ontological supremacy over what was and what will be, then the difference between “having existed” and “existing” is bound to be no deeper than the difference between “existing here” and “existing there”. In this article I show that the view to the effect that the present is privileged, i.e. “presentism”, suffers from a fatal problem concerning the present truth of many past-tensed existential statements. Therefore, we had better abandon it in favour of “eternalism” – the rival view to the effect that between “existing” and “having existed” there is no ontological difference.