"Eternalism" refers to the static "block universe" conception of spacetime, where all events exist simultaneously, past, present and future. "Presentists", by contrast, hold that the past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist and only the present moment exists. Neither are positions about whether there is/was a first moment of time.
I just finished reading the physicist Sean Carroll's book "From Eternity to Here", which is mostly about the thermodynamic arrow of time and big bang cosmology. He briefly discusses presentism and eternalism, before writing:
"Concerning the debate between eternalism and presentism, a typical physicist would say: 'who cares?'"
To be fair to Feser, I don't think he's commenting on the attitudes of contemporary physicists, but on a particular presentation of physics and logic. I doubt any working physicist cares one jot about this presentation, or formal predicate logic in general. Philosophers may well care, and Feser might just be noticing that his colleagues take formal logic far more seriously than it deserves.
Point taken, did not know about those technicalities, but I would argue that then, the example makes even less sense.
> "Concerning the debate between eternalism and presentism, a typical physicist would say: 'who cares?'"
This is a great illustration that physics doesn’t care one way or another, or more properly, from the point of view of physics the question is meaningless.
Claiming that somehow physics has a biased view in a question it refuses to address altogether is weird.
Some physicists are interested in quantum logic – that is very much a minority taste within the physics community though. Like interpretations of quantum physics in general, it straddles the boundary between physics and philosophy. (But unlike some more purely philosophical interpretations, it does have some mathematical meat to it.)
I just finished reading the physicist Sean Carroll's book "From Eternity to Here", which is mostly about the thermodynamic arrow of time and big bang cosmology. He briefly discusses presentism and eternalism, before writing:
"Concerning the debate between eternalism and presentism, a typical physicist would say: 'who cares?'"
To be fair to Feser, I don't think he's commenting on the attitudes of contemporary physicists, but on a particular presentation of physics and logic. I doubt any working physicist cares one jot about this presentation, or formal predicate logic in general. Philosophers may well care, and Feser might just be noticing that his colleagues take formal logic far more seriously than it deserves.