Philosophical Presentism
Presentism is the view that only present entities exist (or, equivalently, that everything is present.)
Past events have happened, and future events will happen but neither exist at all because they do not exist now.
Augustine Of Hippo proposed that the present is analogous to a knife edge placed exactly between the perceived past and the imaginary future and does not include the concept of time.
Fyodor Shcherbatskoy
Everything past is unreal, everything future is unreal, everything imagined is absent, mental… is unreal. Ultimately, real is only the present moment of physical efficiency (i.e. causation)
In the modern theory of relativity, the conceptual observer is at a geometric point in both space and time at the apex of the ‘light cone’ which observes the events laid out in time as well as space. Different observers may disagree on whether two events at different locations occurred simultaneously depending on whether the observers are in relative motion (see relativity of simultaneity). This theory depends upon the idea of time as an extended thing and has been confirmed by experiment, thus giving rise to a philosophical viewpoint known as four dimensionalism. Although the contents of an observation are time-extended, the conceptual observer, being a geometric point at the origin of the light cone, is not extended in time or space. This analysis contains a paradox in which the conceptual observer contains nothing, even though any real observer would need to be the extended contents of an observation to exist. This paradox is partially resolved in relativity theory by defining a ‘frame of reference’ to encompass the measuring instruments used by an observer. This reduces the time separation between instruments to a set of constant intervals.
Growing Block Universe
The past and present both exist, but the future as yet does not. The present is an objective property, to be compared with a moving spotlight Attention
related: Three This is an alternative to eternalism (in which past, present and future all exist) and presentism (only the present exists.)
C.D Broad
It will be observed that such a theory as this accepts the reality of the present and the past, but holds that the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present. On the other hand, the essence of a present event is, not that it precedes future events, but that there is quite literally nothing to which it has the relation of precedence. The sum total of existence is always increasing, and it is this which gives the time-series a sense as well as an order. A moment t is later than a moment t’ if the sum total of existence at t includes the sum total of existence at t’ together with something more
Thought
I’ve only copied this down because of this line “that fresh slices of existence” and fresh slices, like a pizza pie of the present. The purest philosophical present is a fresh slice of pizza, yes.
According to the growing block view, tense is a real property of the world so his thought is about now, the objective present.