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Something called a "book of abstracts TELS 2022" includes a summary of one Ulrich Meyer's essay on a topic in temporal logic:

The challenge is to explain how eternal objects would differ from non-existent objects. Unicorns and round squares do not exist at any time, either, because they do not exist at all. Non-existent objects cannot be counted as eternal without eroding the difference between eternalism about God and atheism, or between eternalism about numbers and mathematical nominalism.

This short paper looks at two attempts at addressing this problem. The first proposal introduces an eternal tense operator that is supposed to make claims about a point at eternity in the same way in which, say, the past tense makes claims about past times. [emphasis added]

I haven't been able to find an independent copy of the essay online somewhere. So how does the at-eternity (AE) operator work? The above says it's as a tense operator; so, for example, are there interchange rules for AE like for F ("it will be true that") and P ("it was true that"), etc.? I imagine there's some trouble with a translation into was/is/will-be talk, like do you have to introduce a combined tense there via... I don't know... a word like "wouislld," to get at a comparison of an eternal tense with an in-time one? Or can one always sufficiently rewrite a tense operator as "it is true that it was/is/will be true that," the caveat here being that we reuse "is" for some non-present tense anyway? (Non-present in time, that is; though if we want to push the word "timeless" harder, maybe we would want to avoid even the shadow of the present tense with respect to timeless eternity?)

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    Eternal tense operator and the point at eternity appear already in his freely accessible 2001 dissertation, p. 86ff, but the abstract is from 2022, so things might have changed. He also published a book, The Nature of Time, in between.
    – Conifold
    Sep 29 at 0:17
  • @prof_post I'm not sure what help I can be on this score, but my profile here is imported from Facebook, so if you look up my name there and find the one with the moth picture (it's the Chrysiridia ripheus species) you can message me about non-SE questions. I'm not certified in psychological counseling, though, so I would have to balance further outside recommendations with the limited assistance I could directly offer.
    – Kristian Berry
    Oct 5 at 13:40
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    ok cool. dwai! that was extremely grounding!!
    – user67675
    Oct 5 at 13:41
  • nb i did not think you were them, only that you were posing as someone else and were acquainted. cool, i'm insane hahah
    – user67675
    Oct 5 at 13:47

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