The Ontology of the Past: Whitehead and Santayana

Abstract

fact that there is something peculiar about a proposition that attempts to judge some event in the past has been long recognized by philosophers. We constantly refer to the pageant of history and its rel evance to the events that constitute our present. But what guarantees the truth or falsehood of our judgments about past events, if they are long gone? On this score, it matters little whether we refer to the truth of Caesar's death on the Ides of March, the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, or Kyle's birthday party on the day before I write this sen tence. fact of the matter is that the past is past irrespective of the span of time that has lapsed up to the present moment. Thus, the ques tion I wish to consider is sharply focused on the ontological basis for our judgments about the past and not the skeptical problem of how we can know things about the past. Ancient relics, memories, and footprints in the sand (however reliable or unreliable they might be) fail to address the issue of how propositions about the past refer to their objects. Recent discussions on this topic have focused attention on the dis tinction between the tensed and the tenseless views originating in J. M. E. McTaggart's famous paper, The Unreality of Time (1921).2 Tensed theorists accept the intuitive experience of time as a process of becom ing and affirm the reality of temporal passage. In accordance with what McTaggart called the A-series, past, present, and future are funda mentally different with regard to their respective ontological status. Propositions are judged to be true or false because of tensed facts about events, for example, that a birthday party will happen tomorrow, is