Book Reviews 375 knowledging a certain status, such as addressing the judge in court as "Your Honour". But conflating respect-recognition with behavior leads to conceive respect as forceable, though forced respect sounds contradictory, and certainly does not satisfy the claim to be respected. To my mind, that is the reason why respect for differences cannot be demanded. In conclusion, Balint's work, though prospecting an original reflection on toleration, completely overlooks the symbolic aspect which plays such an important role in the conflicts over diversity and in their proper resolution via principled accommodations. University of Eastern Piedmont ANNA ELISABETTA GALEOTTI Cameron, Ross P., The Moving Spotlight. An Essay on Time and Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. x + 219. Time flows. Things change. What is now present was future and will be past. Notoriously, 'A-theorists' (who believe that the passage of time is a genuine feature of reality) have tried to characterise this idea in a rigorous way. One prominent group, the 'presentists', think of the flow of time as a relentless process of creation and annihilation of purely present things. Past and future entities are no part of the inventory of the world.1 Non-presentist A-theories, by contrast, inflate their ontology with more than merely present things. Some, the 'growing block' theorists, allow for the existence of past things, such as dinosaurs and Roman Emperors. Their inventory of the world becomes bigger and bigger as time goes by, including a growing list of things that were present but are no longer.2 There is also the "mirror image" of the growing block view, which holds that future things exist, in addition to present ones, but that there are no past things whatsoever. While Caesar is no longer part of the ontological inventory, future Martian outposts are included; the outposts are "out there" waiting to become present. In other words, the flow of time "shrinks" the edge of the block, making the inventory of the world smaller and smaller as time goes by.3 The last non-presentist A-theory is the 'moving spotlight' view (hereafter, 'MSV'). MSV is a theory according to which 'presentness' is something that moves, "somewhat like the spot of light from a policeman's bull's-eye traversing the fronts of the houses in a street. What is illuminated is the present, what has been illuminated is the past, and what has not yet been illuminated is the future".4 MSV is a version of 'eternalism', the view that past, present, and future 1 See, e.g., Hinchliff, M. 1996, "The Puzzle of Change", in Tomberlin, J.E. (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, 10, Cambridge (MA): Blackwell, 119-36; Markosian, N. 2004, "A Defense of Presentism", in Zimmerman, D. (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 47-82. 2 See, e.g., Correia, F. and Rosenkranz, S., 2013, "Living on the Brink, or Welcome Back, Growing Block!", in Bennett, K. and Zimmerman, D. (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, 8, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 333-50; Forbes, G.A. 2015, "The Growing Block's Past Problems", Philosophical Studies, 173, 699-709. 3 See, e.g., Casati, R. and Torrengo, G. 2011, "The not so Incredible Shrinking Future", Analysis, 71, 1-5; Hudson, H. and Wasserman, R. 2009, "Van Inwagen on Time Travel and Changing the Past", in Zimmerman, D. (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, 5, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 41-49. 4 Broad, C.D. 1923, Scientific Thought, London: Kegan Paul, 59. See, e.g., Skow, B. 2009, Argumenta, May 2017 376 things all exist: Caesar, Lady Gaga, and the Mars outposts all exist, they are all equally real, and they are each located in different parts of the temporal dimension. The view that past and future are equally part of the realm of being is defended also by 'B-theorists'.5 In contrast to an A-theorist's approach to time, a Btheorist does not take pastness, presentness, and futurity (the 'A qualities') to be part of the fundamental level of reality. No instant can be said to be past, present or future in an absolute sense. Instants of time would be tied together ('ordered') by a mere relation of temporal precedence or succession (the 'B relations'). According to many, the differences between A-theories and B-theories do not prevent philosophers from combining elements of the two approaches. MSV, in particular, is often thought of as exploiting a distinctively B-theoretic ontology (i.e., eternalism) plus the A-theoretic notion of absolute presentness. Ross Cameron's latest book, The Moving Spotlight, takes a step in a different direction. His central, thought-provoking claim is that MSV should be understood as closer to presentism than to a refined version of B-theoretic eternalism. In a nutshell, his idea is that MSV should be conceived as an enriched A-theory, wherein the truth of tensed sentences (e.g., 'Alice is standing' and 'Martha was sitting') rests upon the way things are now. And, in accordance with presentism, Cameron's view maintains that there is no difference between how things are and how things are right now (162). Nevertheless, Cameron's MSV is genuinely distinct from presentism, since "non-present as well as present entities are some way now" (162). In other words, the moving spotlighter grants that one can speak from the present perspective about the non-present. That one can say how non-present things now are. Truth simpliciter is present truth, but amongst the way things are now-contra presentism-is that mere past and future entities are some way or other (258). According to Cameron, this distinctive version of MSV is the best A-theoretic metaphysics on the market. Such a claim might sound puzzling. Famously, and importantly, there are at least six problems that a good A-theory should be able to address: (1) the so-called 'epistemological problem' ("How do you know that you are now now?"), (2) J.M.E. McTaggart's infamous paradox, (3) a problem of providing adequate truth-makers for past-tensed sentences, (4) a problem of accounting for relations to non-present things, (5) a problem of addressing our intuitions about the openness of the future, and (6) a problem of explaining in what sense the present is 'privileged'. Now, it is widely held that presentism and the growing block view perform better than MSV when dealing with these problems. Growing block theorists are able to deal with (3), (4), (5), and (6), although they struggle with (1) and (2). Presentists, on the other hand, offer an elegant solution to (1), (2), and (6), but face difficulties with the rest. But MSV is usually taken to be in the worst position, overall, since it offers a satisfactory answer to only two of them: (3) and (4).6 Ross Cameron's aim in The Moving Spot- "Relativity and the Moving Spotlight", Journal of Philosophy, 106, 666-78; Skow, B. 2012, "Why Does Time Pass?", Noûs, 46, 223-42; Deasy, D. 2015, "The Moving Spotlight Theory", Philosophical Studies, 172, 2073-89. 5 See, e.g., Mellor, D.H. 1998, Real Time II, London & New York: Routledge; Oaklander, N.A. 2004, The Ontology of Time, Amherst (NY): Prometheus Book; Le Poidevin, R. 2007, The Images of Time, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 6 The fact that presentism and the growing block view solve more problems than MSV is Book Reviews 377 light is to establish that his novel version of MSV successfully addresses all six important problems, in contrast to standard iterations of MSV. The book is divided into five chapters. In Chapter 1, Cameron argues that, contrary to popular belief, presentism faces the epistemological problem as much as other A-theories. In Chapter 2, he deals with McTaggart's paradox. Cameron concludes that neither the regress nor the circularity identified by McTaggart's argument are vicious; they do not justify the denial of the Atheoretic approach. Chapter 3 explains why MSV is more attractive within an approach to truth-making according to which "giving an ontological underpinning of tense is to say what makes it the case that the tensed truths are true" (24). This approach is opposed to the so-called 'Quine-Lewis-Sider position', according to which "giving an ontological underpinning of tense is to say what it is in tenseless terms for a tensed claim to be true" (23-24). In Chapter 4, Cameron develops (or, at least, tries to develop) a view that, as we anticipated above, shares with presentism the thesis that how things are now is how they are simpliciter, while inflating the ontology with more than present things. Finally, Chapter 5 analyses how this version of MSV can account for our intuitions concerning the metaphysical difference between a 'fixed' past and an 'open' future. Is this book worth the read? Yes. Absolutely. At the very least, it is a brilliant defence of MSV. Still, we think there is a crucial point in Cameron's approach that makes his theory obscure, to say the least. As we said above, according to Cameron, to exist simpliciter is to exist now. But, in contrast to the presentist, Cameron accepts that also non-present things are part of reality now, in some way or other. This allows Cameron to defend the claim that his MSV is not a sui generis B-theory, since he does not believe in the reality of past or future. What he believes in is the reality of past and future things, which can be truly described by saying how they are now, whereas the way they were or will be is not part of reality. Still, Cameron does not seem to offer any account of the way in which past and future things have now irreducible pastor future-tensed properties, such as "having been such-and-such". Of course, Cameron might describe the instantiation of a pastor future-tensed property in terms of a present instantiation of that same property. But what does it mean exactly? Why should we take an object instantiating a property now to be a past or future entity instead of a mere present object? In short, one might have the suspicion that Cameron's view could ultimately collapse into a version of presentism in disguise.7 Centre for Philosophy of Time SAMUELE IAQUINTO Department of Philosophy VALERIO BUONOMO University of Milan good evidence in favour of the first two theories only under the hypothesis that the problems are equally forceful; and this seems controversial. For example, one might be skeptical on whether, in developing a theory of time, the epistemological concerns raised by the first problem carry the same weight as the metaphysical concerns raised by the remaining ones. 7 We would like to thank Dave Ingram and Giuliano Torrengo for helpful comments on a previous version of this review.