The Stanford Enyclopedia thing is a language game. Trying to make deductions in natural language about unrelated statements is not the kind of thing that can tell you what time is, one way or another. It can only tell you something about how we use language.
But also, why do we need an argument against presentism? Presentism seems a priori quite implausible; seems a lot simpler for the universe to be an unchanging 4d block than a 3d block that “changes over time”, which introduces a new ontological primitive that can’t be formalized. I’ve never seen a mathematical object that changes over time, I’ve only seen mathematical objects that have internal axes.
The Stanford Enyclopedia thing is a language game. Trying to make deductions in natural language about unrelated statements is not the kind of thing that can tell you what time is, one way or another. It can only tell you something about how we use language.
But also, why do we need an argument against presentism? Presentism seems a priori quite implausible; seems a lot simpler for the universe to be an unchanging 4d block than a 3d block that “changes over time”, which introduces a new ontological primitive that can’t be formalized. I’ve never seen a mathematical object that changes over time, I’ve only seen mathematical objects that have internal axes.