Quantifiers and Temporal Ontology
Department of Philosophy, 26 Nichol Ave., Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA sider{at}philosophy.rutgers.edu
Eternalists say that non-present entities (for instance dinosaurs) exist; presentists say that they do not. But some sceptics deny that this debate is genuine, claiming that presentists simply represent eternalists' quantifiers over non-present entities in different notation. This scepticism may be refuted on purely logical grounds: one of the leading candidate presentist quantifiers over non-present things has the inferential role of a quantifier. The dispute over whether non-present objects exist is as genuine and non-verbal as the dispute over whether there is life on other planets.