Higher‐Order Tense Realism

Realism about tense comes in various forms. In “Tense and Reality” (2005) and “The Reality of Tense” (2006), Kit Fine offered a helpful taxonomy that contributed to shape the current debate on the topic. In our paper “Eternal Facts in an Ageing Universe” (2012), we improved upon this taxonomy, identifying a further type of view that Fine leaves out: Dynamic Absolutism. Both these taxonomies construe the different versions of tense realism in terms of first‐order quantification over facts or states of affairs. Our goal is to show that the logical space of these first‐order tense‐realist positions can be replicated using higher‐order quantification instead. Along the way, we rebut the claim that there is no coherent higher‐order version of Dynamic Absolutism—a claim that one would naturally attribute to Lukas Skiba in his “Higher‐Order Being and Time” (2025) given the way he formulates his critique, even though the view that he actually intends to put forward may plausibly be more moderate.