2026.04.11 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
M. Oreste Fiocco, Time and the World: Every Thing and Then Some, Oxford University Press, 2024, 328pp., $132.00 (hbk) ISBN 978019777710.
Reviewed by Ulrich Meyer, Colgate University
In this ambitious book, Fiocco defends two remarkable theses. The first is the claim that the world is ontologically flat, “that each thing is fundamental; that reality has no ontological levels and […] that no thing is grounded in or made to be by another” (xv). The second is a version of the presentist thesis that nothing exists that is not present. While promoting presentism itself is not all that remarkable, Fiocco tries to make an unusually strong case. Rather than appeal to common sense or philosophical intuition, he claims to provide irrefutable, knock-down arguments for both of his theses.
These knock-down arguments are said to emerge from Fiocco’s fundamentalist approach to metaphysics, which he calls “original inquiry”. This inquiry is occasioned by confronting the…
