1 David Ingram, Thisness Presentism: An Essay on Time, Truth, and Ontology, Routledge, 2019, 216pp., £115.00, ISBN 9781138322103 Reviewed by Natalja Deng, Yonsei University https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/thisness-presentism-an-essay-on-time-truth-and-ontology/ Are there objective differences between the past, present, and future? In particular, are present events and entities somehow more real than those wholly in the past or in the future? If you’re inclined to answer ‘Yes’, you’re inclined towards presentism, the view that ‘necessarily, it is always the case that only present entities exist and what is present changes’ (TP, 35). Presentism has seemed commonsensical to many. But it’s not easy to be a presentist. If you’re a presentist, you have your philosophical work cut out for you. In Thisness Presentism (call it ‘TP’), D. Ingram presents a thoughtful, elegant, and beautifully argued defense of a particular version of presentism, a version that has hitherto not been developed in detail (though Ingram acknowledges important precursors in e.g. (Adams 1986), (Keller 2004), (Plantinga 1974), and (Diekemper 2015)). The aim is to defend presentism by defending its best version. Given this aim, one might expect a defense of presentism over other views, followed by a defense of thisness presentism over rival versions of presentism. That’s not quite how TP proceeds. Ch. 2 does point to three reasons to be a presentist, including its alleged proximity to common sense. But these are offered as minimal, defeasible reasons to be a presentist, and as reasons to be interested in the project. They are not presented as a full-scale defense of presentism over rivals. The book is about how thisness presentism can help presentists solve various problems, and how on the whole, it does this better than presentist competitors. Thus, it seems natural to think of it as a conditional defense of thisness presentism: if you’re a presentist, you should be a thisness presentist. Before presenting thisness presentism, Ingram provides a helpful discussion of what he takes presentism, in general, to say. His definition (cited in the first paragraph above) succeeds in capturing the mainstream understanding. At the same time, it incorporates some substantial (and sensible) choices, such as to include in presentism a claim about dynamicity or temporal passage, namely that what is present changes. Here as elsewhere in TP, Ingram elegantly moves forward a voluminous and wide-ranging literature. Ch. 1 also discusses the triviality argument – roughly, the objection that presentism is either the trivially true view that only present entities exist now, or the clearly false view that only present entities have existed, exist now, or will exist. Ingram seems sympathetic to the response that it’s the view that only present entities exist, simpliciter (though more attention is given to ‘only present entities existed, exist