Abstract:
Presentists do not believe that the past or the future exist. Presentists generally do believe, however, that one can make true statements about the past, and perhaps about the future. A great many attempts have been made to establish some system of presentist truthmaking that allows for past truths, even though no past exists to ground them. These attempts have been criticised heavily, since they often commit presentists to all sorts of unhappy ontological commitments or unintuitive truthmaking principles. This talk, which is based on an forthcoming paper, investigates whether presentists might do better by just denying that there are any past truths at all. While this approach has its challenges, I outline how an appropriate system of physics could explain why there still seems to be truths about the past, at least on the macroscopic scale. I finish by considering how this new theory of "hard" presentism might be defended against other objections to presentism, such as the objection from relativity.