On Ceasing to Exist---Further Thoughts

In this piece written in December 2019 I commented on an argument Bill published earlier that year.   Bill presented this seemingly inconsistent tetrad.

1) Datum: There are predicates that are true of things that no longer exist, e.g., 'dead' and 'famous' and 'fondly remembered' are true of JFK. 
2) Veritas sequitur esse: If a predicate is true of an item x, then x exists.
3) Presentism: For any x, x exists iff x is temporally present.
4) The Dead: For any x, if x is dead, then x is temporally non-present.

I have two objections here.  First, in the formulation that Bill gives of VSE it is false.  Take the predicate 'does not exist' and apply it to the mythical creature called 'Pegasus'.  The resulting sentence, 'Pegasus does not exist', is true so Bill's VSE would allow us to conclude that Pegasus does exist.  An immediate contradiction.   Bill's VSE begs the question against the Presentist who would not concede that JFK has to exist in order to be famous or veridically remembered.  'JFK is famous'  does not assert that an extant JFK has the property of 'being famous'.  It says that many people now know his name and can tell you something about his role in US politics.  Indeed, you needn't ever to have existed in order to be famous.  Sherlock Holmes, perhaps.   But you do need to once have existed in order to be veridically remembered.

Second, Bill puts great store on the predicate 'is dead'.   But it seems to give us an immediate counter-example to (2).  For if 'is dead' means 'has ceased to exist' means 'no longer exists', then as BIll himself says at the end of the first paragraph, 'JFK is dead' implies 'JFK does not exist, contradicting VSE.

Bill is fond of characterising the Presentist as saying of something no longer extant that it does not exist at all.  I accept that wording.  I don't think the 'at all' adds or subtracts anything.  But that is not to say that it did not exist at all, that is, ever.   Obviously, if JFK didn't (past tense) exist at all he could not be dead, famous, remembered, etc.  Is Bill being a little loose with tense in the underlined phrase?

Bill says, 'Kennedy must in some sense exist if he is to be the object of successful reference and the subject of true predications'.  Does this reveal an attachment to a certain theory of names or of propositions?

Conclusion added in March 2020

I'm more puzzled by Bill's inconsistent tetrad than by the thought he is trying to capture.  Bill says that it's puzzling that a predicate can be true of a thing that doesn't exist.  But why?  We make past-tensed predications of things that don't exist all the time.  In 1943 Kennedy commanded  PT109, for example.  Neither exists now though they both did in 1943.  This is surely 'datanic', as Bill would say, of how we speak of the past.  The problem is that Bill's tetrad introduces theoretical terms like 'predicate', 'temporal presence', 'tenseless existence', etc, and principles like Veritas Sequitur Esse on which we rightly place less trust than we do on ordinary language.  The philosopher's new-fangled tools need further refinement.