pastness

Pastness is the temporal property or relation of being in the past relative to the present moment. It applies to events, states, or objects that have already occurred or existed before now, and it is inherently dependent on a reference point in time, which can change as time advances.

In philosophy of time, pastness is contrasted with presentness and futurity. Debates about pastness intersect with theories such as presentism, which locates existence only in the present, and eternalism or four‑dimensionalism, which treats past and future events as equally real within a spacetime block. In those views, pastness can be treated as a relational predicate: an event has pastness relative to a given temporal reference, such as the current moment or a specified time coordinate.

In linguistics, pastness is a fundamental feature of tense and aspect. Verbs often encode pastness through past tense or perfective aspect; languages may also use adverbs or evidential markers to indicate that an utterance refers to something past. Some languages distinguish remote from immediate past, adding nuance to how pastness is expressed and interpreted.

Cognitively, humans distinguish past events in memory and imagination, enabling mental time travel and the recounting of histories. Historical writing and historiography organize knowledge around pastness by reconstructing, interpreting, and narrating events that are no longer present. Pastness thus operates across discourse, cognition, and reality as a way to situate events in time.