Category: Time and Change
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Worry and Regret and Time
Worry and regret form a pair in that each involves flight from the present; worry flees the present toward an unknown future, regret toward an unchangeable past. The door to Reality, however, is hinged on the axis of the Now. If access is to be had to the nunc stans it is only via the…
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Substantial Change, Prime Matter, and Individuation
Eric Levy wants to talk about prime matter. I am 'primed' and my powder's dry: Nihil philosophicum a me alienum putamus. "I consider nothing philosophical to be foreign to me." Change, Accidental and Substantial There is no change without a substrate of change which, in respect of its existence and identity, does not change during…
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Presentism Between Scylla and Charybdis
What better topic of meditation for New Year's Morn than the 'passage' of time. May the Reaper grant us all another year! "I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think." (Nietzsche) ………….. If presentism is to be a defensible thesis, a 'presentable' one if you will, then…
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Vita Brevis
This mess we are in, this predicament, the fall into time . . . leaves us no time for its solution.
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The Idolatry of the Transient
It is because we want more than the transient that we cling to it.
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Time Trouble
It is troubling that our lives will end. But for some of us it is even more troubling that they are constantly ending. It is not as if we are fully real now and later will not be; it is rather that our temporal mode of existence is not fully real. At each moment our…
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Theism Meets Metaphysical Naturalism
The following is an excerpt of an e-mail from the Barcelona lawyer, Daniel Vincente Carillo. As I mentioned to him in a private e-mail, I admire him for tackling these great questions, and doing so in a foreign language. The pursuit of these questions ennobles us while humbling us at the same time. Carillo writes,…
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Ashes to Ashes; Dust to Dust
"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem…
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Did the Universe Have a Beginning in Time?
Some of you may remember the commenter 'spur' from the old Powerblogs incarnation of this weblog. His comments were the best of any I received in over ten years of blogging. I think it is now safe to 'out' him as Stephen Puryear of North Carolina State University. He recently sent me a copy of…
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John Anderson, Heraclitus the Obscure, and the Depth of Change
A. J. Baker on John Anderson: ". . . there are no ultimates in Anderson's view and in line with Heraclitus he maintains that things are constantly changing, and also infinitely complex . . . ." (Australian Realism, Cambridge UP, 1986, p. 29, emphasis added) Change is a given. From the earliest times sensitive souls…
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Aristotle on the New Year
Ed sends his best wishes from London in the form of a quotation from The Philosopher: "Since the 'now' is an end and a beginning of time, not of the same time however, but the end of that which is past and the beginning of that which is to come, it follows that, as the…
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Time
Time is a goddess of healing — for a time. She heals the wounds that come inevitably to those who must march to her beat. She brings us ill and makes us well again until such time as she does us in for good.
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This Just Now In: There is no Now! More Bad Philosophy from a Physicist
One of the tasks of philosophy is to expose bad philosophy. Scientists pump out quite a lot of it. Physicists are among the worst. I have given many examples. Here is another one. Let's get to work. Dartmouth physicist Marcelo Gleiser writes in There is No Now, You say, “I’m reading this word now.” In…
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Is Dying an Accidental or a Substantial Change?
On animalism, I am just a (live) human animal. And so are you. But there is a reason to think that I cannot be identical to my animal body. The reason is that it will survive me. (Assume that there is no natural immortality of the soul.) Assume that I die peacefully in my bed.…
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Patrick Toner on Hylomorphic Animalism
Herewith, some comments on and questions about Patrick Toner's fascinating paper, "Hylemorphic Animalism" (Philos Stud, 2011, 155: 65-81). Patrick Toner takes an animalist line on human persons. Animalism is the doctrine that each of us is identical to an animal organism. A bit more precisely, "Animalism involves two claims: (1) we are human persons and…