Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Time and Change

  • Presentism and Existence-Entailing Relations: An Aporetic Tetrad

    It is plausibly maintained that all relations are existence-entailing. To illustrate from the dyadic case: if R relates a and b, then both a and b exist.   A relation cannot hold unless the things between which or among which it holds all exist.  A weaker, and hence even more plausible, claim is that all relations…

  • Ersatz Eternity

    What has been, though it needn't have been, always will have been.  What time has mothered, no future time can touch.   What you were and that you were stands forever inscribed in the roster of being whether or not anyone will read the record.  You will die, but your having lived will never die.  But how paltry…

  • Why Are We Bothered by our Temporal but not our Spatial Limitations?

    Our lives have definite limits both in space and in time. At any given time, my body occupies a vanishingly small portion of space, and if one were to plot my path over time, the resulting space-time ‘trajectory’ would pass through an exceedingly small number of spatiotemporal positions. And yet my spatial limitations do not…

  • Is Everything Always Continuously Changing in Every Respect?

    Over lunch today the Buddhist claim that all is impermanent came up for discussion.   Let’s see how plausible this claim of impermanence is when interpreted to mean that everything is always continuously changing in every respect. We need to ask four questions. Does everything change? Do the things that change always change? Do the things…