Temporal existence and temporal location

Abstract

In everyday discourse, we frequently use the tensed verb 'to exist' as a means to predicate temporal location. Thus when, in ordinary circumstances, we utter the sentence 'There existed no man-made weather events until after the Industrial Revolution', we are naturally taken to say no more than that there were no man-made weather events located at any time before the Industrial Revolution. We are not, thereby, already making any controversial ontological claim, viz. that some of the things that are presently something were nothing before the Industrial Revolution. In philosophical contexts, by contrast, we do use the tensed verb 'to exist' in order to speak, precisely, about what is presently something but in the past, was nothing. There are accordingly two distinct notions readily expressed by the tensed verb 'to exist' that it is of crucial importance not to conflate: the notion of being located at the present time, and the notion of belonging to the domain of quantification at the present time. Nevertheless, conflation of these two notions abounds in the contemporary debate about presentism - or so we shall undertake to demonstrate. Before this diagnosis can be appreciated as correct, however, it behoves us to make the distinction between these two notions, and their applications, as clear as possible.