After reading A Defence of Presentism by Ned Markosian I've got some questions.

After reading A Defence of Presentism by Ned Markosian I've got some questions.

1) what does it mean to "grab the thing that is now the referent of ‘Socrates’, and then to go back to see whether there is some past time at which that thing is a philosopher."? (p. 26) A Presentist can't "go back" into the past (if that's what it means).

2) what, for a Presentist, is the relationship between a mathematical object and the present?

What a Presentist could do is refer to a different location on his coordinated map, a "history", in the present. The map is such that the meaning of "Schubert started his Symphony No. 8 in 1822" presently refers to a map that is also present, but the map, a "history of sublime music", is ordered by our (present) notion of causality.

This allows us to suppose the mathematical object (... 1821, 1822, 1823, ...) "timelessly" coordinatizes history, in the present. The sense of 'time' in which the map is independent of change is precisely the map's own notion of time.

Reference: A Defence of Presentism by Ned Markosian, Western Washington University, on the web at http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/nmarkos/Papers/Defpres.pdf, also a version appears in Zimmerman, Dean W. (ed.) Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Volume 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 47-82.