I have to admit to being somewhat dismayed by the usage of words in this debate. I understand philosophy to be about taking maximum care over the premisses introduced into argument. That starts with making sure that words are unambiguous. Within science there is a tacit acceptance that words often have several meanings relating to completely different ontological categories and although this is sloppy and potentially hazardous it is usually resolved by being clear about context. Thus time and space relate to at least three quite different sorts of concept, dynamic, historic and experiential. Only certain meanings of time have a present (and even these are not necessarily commensurable). If you try talking of a present using time in another sense you get into this sort of mess. 'Exists' has several different meanings. 

It worry that philosophers, rather than being picky about what words mean, often find it hard to accept that almost all the important words in metaphysics have this sort of ontologically diverse polysemy. This is all the more odd since a ten year old child can see that 'the event of Caesar crossing the Rubicon exists' tells us more about the muddled structure of our language than about the nature of the world. They would be puzzled because it uses words in a context that we learn to avoid because it tends to force us to conflate meanings. Peirce, Russell, Frege, Carnap, Sellars and others had things to say about this but I am unclear that any of them fully understood the complexity of metaphysical, rather than just operational, dichotomies underlying our words.


I could expand, but maybe I should just give a pointer to the principles (http://appearancesandrealities.blogspot.com) that seem to me to underly the current question.