New paper: 'Presentism Remains'.

Today I got the good news that my paper 'Presentism Remains' has been accepted for publication at Erkenntnis. It's a chunky paper, at about 13500 words. If you want to, you can read it here. The gist of the paper is that the way in which some people have been thinking about presentism and methodology in the philosophy of time is wrong; that there are some advantages to holding existence presentism (that I've defended here, here and here), which I describe as the view that existence is presence, and that when it comes to the philosophy of time we should be careful to distinguish ontological questions from metaphysical questions. I contrive to take a lot of words saying all of that. My primary targets in the paper are folks like Daniel Deasy, Timothy Williamson, Sven Rosenkranz and Fabrice Correia, all of whom have written about the way in which presentism could and should be thought of, and about methodology in the philosophy of time.

What am I doing?

As much to get things clear in my own mind, as anything else, here's what I'm currently working on.

Two papers on trust, with a particular focus on how to move from theoretical claims about trust, to applications in business. (Me, trust? Yeah, I'm as surprised as you are. A while back I taught a class on epsistemology and taught a fabulous paper by Katherine Hawley--which is to say that it was a paper by Katherine Hawley. It got me hooked.)

I've got some way through a(nother) paper about the epistemic objection to hybrid A-theories in the 'how can you know that you're now, now' literature, kicked off by Craig Bourne and DBM.

With David Ingram I'm doing a bit more work on the presentism and truthmaking literature. We also have plans for something more extensive, but that's still very much in the TOP SECRET category (aka: insufficiently well formed to discuss publicly). On my own I'm also kicking about a few things to do with presentism. One day I'd like to write a book about presentism, but I don't think I'm quite there yet.

Two papers (and then maybe a book?) on timelessness.

I have a funny little project on advice and recommendation, too. I'd like to know what they are and whether they differ from one another.

Sam Baron and I have some very early stage work on parsimony and fundamentality that we're trying to work up. It follows up earlier work that Sam and I have done together on parsimony and fundamentality.

Oh, and I've just started work on a paper on mereology and intuitions. We'll see where that ends up.