Manifesto and Summary of Existential Realism: What Exists, What’s Real, and Why It Matters

Existential Realism (ER) is a novel ontological framework that distinguishes between existence (the empirically accessible present) and reality (the broader tapestry of past and future entities and events). This two-tier ontology preserves the primacy of the present now while granting ontological status to non-present times in a way that avoids the pitfalls of both presentism and eternalism. We summarize ER’s core definitions and motivations, drawing from metaphysics, cognitive science, and physics to illustrate why separating existence from reality matters. ER offers a synthesis: like presentism it holds that only the present exists, yet like eternalism it affirms that past and future entities can still be real. We provide examples from neuroscience (memory and anticipation), physics (causal traces and relativity), formal logic (truthmakers and temporal reasoning), and ethics (duties to past and future) to demonstrate ER’s explanatory power. We discuss implications for our understanding of time’s flow, the self’s persistence, causality, and moral agency. The tone is rigorous and realistic, yet forward-looking: ER is presented as both a capstone summary of an emerging framework and an invitation for interdisciplinary inquiry into the nature of time and reality.