ABSTRACT
The 'anti-realist' view, as characterized by Michael Dummett, that 'the past exists only in the traces it has left upon the present' is hard to resist as a philosophical statement. The Chinese vase or Bronze Age arrowhead we see in a museum is there in the present; similarly, the future plays a role in all present calculations as it does when the stock market assigns values to 'sugar futures' or 'oil futures'. The sibyl's voice may be only the ventriloquism of a venal priestess, a shabby deceit; her profound enigma may be only a two-faced formula allowing the seer to claim later, whatever the outcome, that she foretold the truth. The Cartesian cogito is often regarded as a decisive threshold, a turning-point; but it is at least equally one moment among many in the pre-history of 'modern' ways of thinking about the subject and one moment among many in the afterlife of Renaissance Scepticism.
