Lugano Philosophy Colloquia. Fabrice Correia

Fabrice Correia (University of Geneva and USI), joint work with Sven Rosenkranz (University of Barcelona and ICREA), will give a talk on Thursday, September 25 at 4.30pm (CET), Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus), as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia of Fall 2025.

Higher-Order Tense Realism

Chaired by Andrea Lupo

Abstract: There are varieties of realism about tense. Kit Fine (“Tense and Reality”, 2005 and “The Reality of Tense”, 2006) offers a helpful taxonomy. In our paper “Eternal Facts in an Ageing Universe” (2012), we improve upon this taxonomy, identifying a further type of view that Fine: Dynamic Absolutism. Both these taxonomies construe the different versions of tense realism in terms of first-order quantification over facts or states of affairs. Our goal is to show that the logical space of these first-order tense-realist positions can be replicated using higher-order quantification instead: there are matching varieties of higher-order tense realism. Along the way, we rebut an argument given by Lukas Skiba in his “Higher-Order Being and Time” (2025) to the effect that there is no coherent higher-order version of Dynamic Absolutism.

For more info, click here.