highest degree of existence. Being past by one hour and being future by one hour are lower degrees of existence, and being past by 5 billion years and being future by 5 billion years are still lower degrees of existence. The degree to which an item exists is proportional to its temporal distance from the present; the present, which has zero-temporal distance from the present, has the highest (logically) possible degree of existence.

 These degrees are quantifiable in terms of their opposites, degrees of nonexistence. The present has a zero degree of nonexistence. What is one second past has a one second degree of nonexistence, and what is two seconds past has a greater degree of nonexistence, namely, a two second degree of nonexistence.

   There is a difference of degree and not of kind between the present and what is no longer present or not yet present. This is shown by the fact that our present mental state includes temporal parts that are past by 1/millionth of a second, etc., and this small degree of pastness is such a high degree of existence that we cannot experientially distinguish it from present existence, 100% existence. These degrees of existence are immediately given in our phenomenological experience. I believe this theory is logically coherent unless one misinterprets it by assigning a different meaning to "degree of existence" or "degree of nonexistence" than I have assigned it.

2. The Types of Tensed Theories of Time

Philosophers of time today are either tensed theorists or tenseless theorists. The theory of degrees of existence is a type of tensed theory of time, what is most accurately called (in today's parlance) “degree presentism”, to indicate that every item is distanced from the present to some degree (amount of time). This is the first time the phrase "degree presentism" has been used. But I can think of no more accurate name for this theory. The A-theory or tensed theory of time can be divided into five kinds (at least):

i. The three-dimensional equal reality theory. The tensed theory McTaggart articulated is such a theory; the theory he articulated (but did not endorse) implied that future events, present events and past events are equally real. Richard Gale and George Schelesinger held different versions of the three-dimensional equal reality theory. They differed from McTaggart's formulation in several ways, however; for example, they argued B-relations are analyzable into A-properties. The problem with this theory is that the past no

longer exists, whereas the present does exist, and this entails the present has a higher existential status than the past, not an equal status.

ii. C. D. Broad held a two-dimensional equal reality theory. He held that present events and past events are equally real, but that the future is nothingness, i.e. that it is not the case that there is a future. Broad avoided answering such questions as: why am I preparing a lecture for tomorrow if there is no future? And when I expect the mailperson to arrive in the room in the next few minutes, what am I expecting if it is not the case there is anything I am expecting? And what are weather reports about? Are they about nothingness itself? If so, maybe Hedger was on to something. Craig [2000a; 2002] holds that future tense sentence-tokens corresponds to presently existing, abstract states of affairs. This seems problematic since most future tense sentence-tokens (e.g., “the sun will explode in 5 billion years”) are about concrete things or events, not abstract objects. Further, all of these sentence-tokens are not about something that is wholly in the present and only in the present, but something that is not yet present. Craig would be better off if he either claimed that no future tensed sentence-token is true (it is without truth value or has the value of false) or else reductively analyzed the future tense into something nontemporal, such as modals, as does Ludlow [1999]. 

        What is distinctive about these two or three dimensional equal reality theories is that present events do not have greater reality than past and future events or that present events are the only real events. Presentness is neither identical with existence nor logically equivalent to existence, since events exist regardless of whether they are past or present (e.g., on Broad's theory). For example, Broad writes: "There is no such thing as ceasing to exist; what has become exists henceforth for ever." [Broad, p. 88]. However, even apart from the problems I have briefly mentioned above, it is beyond imagining what my dying is if it is not my ceasing to exist, so Broad's philosophy at the very least needs some elaboration if it is not to seem manifestly false.

The equal realities are versions of the standard contemporary "all or nothing" theory of existence; i.e., either a particular exists or it does not exist, and there is no in between state where it exists to some degree and does not exist to some degree.

iii. Degree presentism. This is the theory of temporal degrees of existence that I shall defend in this essay. This theory is a present-

ism since it holds that what exists in the maximal or perfect degree of existence is only what is present. It is degreed since it holds that the past and future are not wholly unreal, but are real to some less than maximal degree. When I remember and expect things, I am not remembering and expecting nothing at all. The past and future exist to some degree, but to a lesser degree than the present. To say that Socrates exists to some degree does not mean, for example, that as he recedes into the past he first loses a hand, then a leg, then his head, etc.; what it means is that has he recedes into the past his distance from the present increases, e.g., from being 2,400 years from the present to being 2,4001 years from the present. I am not merely stipulating that “degree of existence” means “distance from the present”; I claim that this is how we experience existence, as something with degrees, and thus that degree of existence = distance from the present accurately describes our immediate acquaintance with existence and time. If you deny that this is how you experience existence, it is consistent for me to explain this fact by saying that “you are in the grip of a (false) theory” and this prevents you from recognizing experienced existence and time. Alternatively, I could take on the larger project of arguing at length that every other theory of time and existence is either logically invalid or empirically disconfirmed. But here I am taking the first step of arguing that degree presentism is a logically consistent theory, and thus that the “hand wave dismal” of the concept of degrees of existence that began with Russell’s 1904 “On Denoting” has just as much argumentative support that Russell gave his “all or nothing” theory in his 1904 article (i.e., no support at all—-he “refuted” Meinong by “calling him names”, e.g., by saying he “lacks a robust sense of reality”.) It is not without interest that 20^th century theories of existence have their original “justification” in an insult.

    Thus, I do not agree with Tooley [1997: 233] when he writes about “the position that Quentin Smith refers to as ‘presentism’ in his book Language and Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). But Smith’s usage seems very unfortunate, since presentism so understood, is compatible with the existence of past states of affairs See, esp., p. 165”. Tooley is correcting in citing the specific page where this view is expressed in some form. However, each sense of “exists” I distinguish on this page gives presentness a maximal existential status and pastness and futurity a lower status, since the past or future exist in a nonmaximal sense, viz., I say on page 165 that they “exist” in the sense that they are no longer present or are not yet present. What Tooley, Zimmerman, Craig, Ludlow, Markosian, Bigelow and others refer to as “presentism” is only one

version of presentism, namely, the solipsistic version, where presentness not only has the maximal existential status but the only existential status of any sort or degree whatsoever.

4. Modal, solipsistic presentism. Only the present exists in any meaningful sense of "exists" and it is the not the case that any past or future event or thing exists in any sense whatsoever. "Modal" is used in the possible world sense, since the present is conceived as analogous to the actual world and the past and future to merely possible worlds. Prior originated this view and William Craig (2000a; 2002] developed the ontology of this view to the greatest extent. Most tensed theorists of time hold this view in recent times: it is held by Christensen, Lloyd, Levi son, Wolterstorff, Chisholm, Zimmerman, Markosian, Bigelow and others. According to this theory, you have no past or future, since it is not the case that there is a past and future. I believe solipsistic presentism is logically self-contradictory. The main founder of solipsistic presentism, Prior, tellingly defines it in an implicitly self-contradictory way, a way endorsed by Craig, Zimmerman and other solipsistic presentists. Prior writes: “. . .the present simply is the real considered in relation to two particular species of unreality, namely the past and the future.” [Prior, 1998: p. 80]. If the real stands in relation to the unreal, the unreal is real, since only something real can stand in relation to something. Unreality can no more stand in relations than it can possess monadic properties. If one says that Prior means that a thinker is considering the present in relation to unreality, then my response is that the consideration is self-contradictory, since I cannot consistently consider the unreal to stand in a relation to the real. Further, there can only be multiple species of real things; unreality cannot be differentiated into “two particular species”, as Prior says. It is an implicit contradiction suppose that there is some differentia that differentiates one sort of nothingness from another sort of nothingness, since no differentia exist in nothingness or nonexistence. (More precisely, it is a contradiction that “if it is not the case that there is anything but the present, it is the case that there are differentiae in what is not present”.) If one is a presentist, one is forced to be a degree presentist on pain of holding a logically self-contradictory theory (solipsistic presentism).

        Notwithstanding this, Craig should be commended for recognizing some of the logical incoherencies that largely make up Prior’s schematic ontology for solipsistic presentism; Craig begins by quoting Prior’s statement “. . .the reality of the present consists in what the reality of anything consists in, namely the absence of a qualify-

ing prefix’.” In the next sentence Craig comments on Prior’s quoted remark. “This last remark [of Prior] illustrates the sort of conflation of semantics and ontology that so exasperates Smith, for the reality of the lamp before me on my desk does not consist in the absence of a qualifying prefix, since prefixes do not operate on lamps.” [Craig, 2000a: pp. 193-194]”. Degree presentism does not face such difficulties.

v. There is reductivist solipsistic presentism, a recent and novel view first articulated by Peter Ludlow in [1999], where he reduces the past and future tenses by proposing that they fall instead into the linguistic category of evidentials (for the past tense), which have evidence for the proposition expressed as their semantic relata; and modals (for the future tenses), which have dispositions as their semantic content. This theory seems promising, since it avoids the problem of how irreducibly past tensed sentence-tokens can be true if there is no past, or how irreducibly future tensed sentence-tokens can be true if there is no future. But this reductivist theory has problems of coherency of its own. For example, it has to overcome such objections as that “Some space existed for which there is no evidence”, which is contingently true or false, if reductively analyzable in terms of evidentials, becomes the self-contradiction that there is evidence for some space for which there is no evidence. And “A new spatial point p will come into existence in the future, even though nothing present has the disposition for this point’s existence” is contingently true or false but is self-contradictory if it means that something present has the disposition for a spatial point p’s existence, even though nothing present has the disposition for this point’s existence.

By a tensed theory of time I mean a theory that takes tensed truths and tensed states of affairs to be basic. This way of defining a "tensed theory of time" makes Michael Tooley's theory [1997] a tenseless theory of a dynamic time. Whether it is “dynamic” in some intelligible sense in which other tenseless theories are not dynamic is a debatable question [Smith, 2000].

I have a limited goal in this essay; I aim merely to argue that degree presentism is logically unproblematic and is thereby theoretically preferable to modal solipsistic presentism. I discuss this modal solipsistic presentism since it is the most prevalent tensed theory of time and because it is, in my opinion, the most logically incoherent theory of time.

  I make no attempt to answer critics of the tensed theory by tense-

less theorists such as Oaklander [1996], Dyke [forthcoming], Graham Nerlich [1998] and D. H. Mellor [1998]. This would require several papers unto themselves. This paper is degree presentism versus modal solipsistic presentism.

3. Degree Presentism, Tenseless Exemplification, and Existence

Ironically, one of the main arguments of solipsistic presentism is that degree presentism is logically incoherent, whereas degree presentism holds that solipsist presentism is incoherent. One thesis of degree presentism is that there is no primitive, irreducible tenseless quantifier; there is no tenseless sense of "exists" that cannot be analyzed into more basic tensed senses of "exists". I did not develop a "degrees of existence" theory in my 1993 book, Language and Time, but I still hold the view I state on page 165: Language and Time, namely that "x exists" in the tenseless sense means "x existed, exists or will exist", where the middle "exists" is present tensed. This shows that some interpreters of Language and Time, such as William Craig, are wrong in imputing to me the doctrine that every event exists equally in a primitive, irreducible tenseless sense of "exists". Such a view is the way McTaggart conceived of the tensed theory of time, but I reject the idea that properties of futurity, presentness and pastness successively inhere in events that exist in an irreducible tenseless sense of "exist". Solipsistic presentists do not distinguish between the equal reality tensed theory of time, such as the one put forth by McTaggart or Gale, and the degrees of existence theory. But this is not to impute a misunderstanding of some text to these solipsists, for the degrees of temporal existence theory has not been formulated before, and so when I examine their critical comments, this is primarily for heuristic purposes, not to show that they have misunderstood some doctrine that neither I nor anybody has stated in some book, such as Language and Time.

Solipsistic presentists deny not merely that there are properties of pastness and futurity, but even (in some cases) that there is a property of presentness. A.N. Prior said ". . . the presentness of an event is just the event. The presentness of my lecturing, for instance, is just my lecturing." [Prior, 1998: p. 81]. But this cannot be true, for if the presentness of event E is wholly identical with E, then "E is present" means E is E. But it is not a tautology that E is present, but contingently true or false, whereas it is a tautological truth that E is E.

and that the whole of maximal existents is The Presence (or, if you prefer, the present, or the present time). But these are primitive notions, just as Plantinga says possibility, actuality and necessity are primitive notions. You can understand them by examples or synonymous expressions, but they cannot be defined in terms of something else. (Craig [2000a] says existence is the “act of exemplification” but since acts need subjects, “act” is at best a metaphor, since nobody performs the act of exemplification (Craig presumably has in mind a deity). And existence cannot be exemplification, since “exemplification exists” is a contingent truth and yet “exemplification is an exemplification” is a logically necessary truth, and does not even imply that exemplification exists. The present tense sense of exists is the “is” (present tense) in “x is”, or is “a presence” in “x is (tenselessly) identical with a presence”. Maximal existence is also conveyed in “x is (tenselessly) simultaneous with the present” and “x is (tenselessly) a part of The Presence”. Why should such basic notions as exists and presence need to be defined in order to be understood? They don’t, since our ability to find false definitions of exists (present tense) and presence presupposes that we already understand the meaning of “exists” and “presence”. A maximal existent is a presence. (Craig accurately notes that this was my first theory of existence, in my 1986 book The Felt Meanings of the World. To Craig’s credit, he said [2000a] that existence would be presentness if it were not for the fact that some things can exist timelessly. But the credit is only partial. Why should the possibility of timeless existence bar the identity existence with presentness? A timeless existent is a presence that (a) occupies only one instant, this instant being the present, and (b) belongs to a possible world in which there is only that instant—and thus no past or future instants.)

Note that my theory of degrees of existence implies that all predications are reducible to tenseless predications, involving only a tenseless copula “is” or verb phrase (e.g., “runs”). Every relation to the present, xRy, where y is the present, is such that x stands tenselessly in the relation R to the present. Since we have eliminated monadic properties of pastness and futurity, we need only one irreducibly tensed word to state our ontology, namely, the present tensed “exists”. Actually, we can go further and have our entire ontology stated in tenseless language, for we can replace “exists” by “is (tenselessly) simultaneous with the present” and “the present” is a noun phrase, whereas tense is (by definition) an adverbial modification of a verb.

   But this does not mean we belong in Tooley’s camp. For Tooley,

being painful . .  .  Plato cannot exist while having neither body nor soul. What's left of these past and future things and events is too thin. . . Neither Plato nor the headache has any of these ordinary intrinsic properties it displayed while present. . . Past and future things become nearly-bare particulars" [Zimmerman, 1998: p. 212].

       Let us see if we can isolate the structure of this argument against degree presentism about the past or future. First, let us clear up Zimmerman’s fallacies of equivocation upon "exists" and "is" before we get to the heart of the matter.

 The quoted sentences can be reformulated in a coherent way by a degree presentist. Does degree presentism imply that a painful headache is not painful? No. A degree presentist would agree with everyone else that the statement "a painful headache is not painful" is an explicit logical contradiction. What would a degree presentist say about painful headaches? He would say that a headache had been painful while it existed, but since the headache has passed away it is not now paining anyone. To derive a contradiction from degree presentism, we need to equivocate on tensed expressions. Notice that by saying "a painful headache" the tense is omitted, so we do not know from this expression when this headache occurs--whether it is past, present or future. This is tantamount to treating it as tenselessly existing; we (or, rather, Zimmerman)imply it exists, but are omitting to say whether it existed, exists or will exist. Now if we say "a painful headache is not painful" this conversationally implicates (in Grice's sense) that the "is" is used tenselessly, since we are predicating a property of an event that we have identified as existing tenselessly. It is a clear contradiction to say, using the tenseless "is" in the irreducible B-sense, that "a painful headache is (tenselessly) not painful".

But suppose we do not use misleading language and fallacies of equivocation to describe the theory of degrees of existence. Then we would say that the headache, although painful while it was present, is not now paining me, and it is not now paining me precisely because it is no longer present.

And certainly the degree presentist believes that Plato cannot exist without having a body and soul. This means that Plato cannot be present without at the same time having a body and mind. And it implies that if Plato had been present, then Plato had a body and mind while he had been present. But it certainly does not mean that Plato has an irreducible tenseless existence and lacks a body and mind while he tenselessly exists. And it certainly does not mean that Plato is present and presently has no body and mind. And it does not mean that when Plato was present, he lacked a body and soul. It is

true that Plato is tenselessly earlier than the present by over 2,000 years, and his having a body and mind is tenselessly earlier than the present by exactly the same amount of time. But statements of this sort are supposed to be where the problem with the degrees of existence theory lie. Where is the problem?

I think with this new theory of degrees of existence I have avoided a main problem that Zimmerman, Oaklander and Craig have noted with the theory in Language and Time. I there held that past things presently exemplify monadic properties. This implies that the things are not present, but their exemplification of properties lies in the present. How could a thing lie in the past and its states lie in the present? Zimmerman, Oaklander and Craig are right; I should abandon this theory. Contra Craig, and more in line with Oaklander, this theory is not logically self-contradictory but is an implausible synthetic assertion; it may be considered as a synthetic a priori falsehood. Even if it not a synthetic a priori falsehood, but merely implausible, it seems preferable to adopt a more intuitively plausible theory. The degrees of existence theory implies that no nonpresent items presently exemplify properties. Rather past or future items tenselessly stand in relations to the present of being earlier than it to a certain degree or later than it to a certain degree.

Zimmerman, Oaklander and Craig will undoubtedly have something to say about whether or not this new theory is "better" than the old theory, since Oaklander rejects the tensed theory of time and Zimmerman and Craig reject degree presentism. But for now, let us be sure we really have in fact solved the above-discussed problem that Zimmerman posed for any theory that the past and future are real in some sense.

Is there a contradiction in the degrees of existence theory I formulated?

 Note there is no logical contradiction in the statement:

(1) x is no longer present but x tenselessly stands in relation to the present of being earlier than it to a certain degree.

A contradiction would be "x wholly is no longer present and x wholly is present" or "x tenselessly stands in relation to the present of being distant from it to a certain degree and x does not tenselessly stands in relation to the present of being distant from it to a certain degree”. But these contradictions and other contradictions cannot be derived from statement (1).

Let us focus on the distinction between past particulars that the solipsistic presentist calls "nearly-bare par-

ticulars" and present particulars, which are "fully clothed" and thus seem ontologically unproblematic to the solipsist. It is true that past particulars lack the "ordinary intrinsic properties they display while present". In what sense does this make past particulars nearly bare particulars in any ontologically problematic sense?

The unusual feature of degree presentism is summarized as this: Past (or future) particulars do not have nonrelational, monadic properties, but only stand in relations or have relational properties. Thus they are "bare particulars" in the sense that they lack nonrelational, monadic properties. This "bareness" is due the fact that these particulars are only partly real; they are partly unreal in the sense (among other senses) that they are bare in this respect.

The property of being past is, when ontologically analyzed, a relational property. If something is past, it is past by two hours, or past by 7 minutes, etc. Past particulars are partly clothed in the sense that they have relations in which they stand to the present of being temporally distant from it to some degree (amount of time). "Plato walked" means Plato tenselessly exemplifies walking over 2,000 earlier than the present. This temporal distance from the present is another sense is which past particular are partly unreal, for the present is existence, full reality, and past particulars acquire only a degree of existence by virtue of being earlier than the present, by virtue of standing in relation to existence of lacking existence by a partial amount of it (e.g. the amount, 2,000 years).

So we have this result: maximal existents have nonrelational monadic properties and also stand in relations. But particulars that exist to less than the maximal degree only stand in relations. This is one sense in which they are partly real and partly unreal. Let us ask ourselves again; does it involve a logical contradiction?

I believe it can be proven not to be a contradiction. For any present item x, and for each nonrelational or relational property F than a present item x can possess, x has F or x does not have F. This is the precise meaning of the phrase "the present item x is a logically complete individual", i.e. satisfies the logically necessary criteria to exist in the tenseless sense (existed, exists or will exist).

Past items also meet this criterion. For any past item y, and for each nonrelational or relational property F than a past item y can possess, y has F or does not have F. The past item cannot have any nonrelational properties, and so it is does not have any such properties as being spatial, being mental, breathing, and the like.  For each nonrelational property G, it lacks G. But for each relational property R, it either has R or lacks R. For each nonrelational property G it possessed when it was present, it possesses the relational property of

having possessed G a certain amount of time ago. The past particular is bare of nonrelational properties, but this is a necessary condition of it being past to some degree; but it is clothed to a logically sufficient degree. That is, it meets all the logically necessary conditions to exist in a tenseless sense (to have existed, to exist or to exist in the future). This implies that the past item x is a logically complete individual.

But how can a particular exist to any degree without having the nonrelational property of being a particular? The answer is that it has a relational property of being a particular. It had been a particular (say) 150 years earlier than the present time, but it is false that it is (present tense) a particular. There is no such particular that occupies the present time. And since the particular tenselessly exemplifies its relational properties of being temporally distant from the present, none of the states of the particular are present.

This enables us to answer the problem Zimmerman formulated: He writes that the degree doctrine implies the following: "Plato is still a substance, I suppose, but he doesn't talk or think or walk or sleep or have any spatial location" [Zimmerman, 1998: p. 212]. Now we can see two problems. First, does the degree presentist hold that Plato is still a substance, that is, is presently a substance? This, of course, would pose a problem, for it would then be the case that Plato is presently a substance but presently is not in space and, further, presently has no mind.

 But no such substance occupies the present time. It is not the case that Plato is still a substance. The nonrelational property of being a substance is not presently possessed by Plato. Rather, Plato had been a substance while he existed, over 2000 years distant from the present time. Substantiality, like every other property possessed by Plato, characterizes Plato only in the sense that it is part of a relation Plato has to the present. The state of Plato’s tenseless exemplification of being a substance is over 2,000 years earlier than the present.

        What is it that is earlier than the present? It is not an existent. But if it is not an existent, how can it stand in a relation to an existent? The answer is that it does exist--to some degree. To say that "x does not exist", where "exist" means "present", can be analyzed as meaning x does not exist to the maximal degree but exists to a less than maximal degree.  What is the particular that is receding from the present? It is neither a total nonbeing nor a total being. It is a partial existent, which is part way between total nonbeing and total being. Its partial nonbeing consists in its lack of nonrelational properties and its lack of full existence. The “part of being” it lacks is identical with the interval of time that separates the being from the present