Category: Time and Change
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Schopenhauer: Causa Prima and Causa Sui as Contradictiones in Adjecto
Schopenhauer, Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde (1813), sec. 20: . . . causa prima ist, eben so gut wie causa sui, eine contradictio in adjecto, obschon der erstere Ausdruck viel häufiger gebraucht wird, als der letztere, und auch mit ganz ernsthafter, sogar feierlicher Miene ausgesprochen zu werden pflegt, ja Manche, insonderheit…
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Coming into Being and Passing Away: Two Definitions of Chisholm Examined
Some changes are merely accidental or alterational. Others are substantial or existential. It is one thing for Tom to gain or lose weight, quite another for him to come to be or pass away. Alterational changes including gaining weight, shifting position, and becoming depressed. Such changes are changes in a thing that already exists and…
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Peter Geach 1916-2013
Here is a Commonweal obituary. The obit contains a couple of minor inaccuracies. 1. "Under his father's tutelage, one of Geach's earliest philosophical influences was the metaphysician J.M.E. McTaggart, who infamously argues in his 1908 book The Unreality of Time for, well, the unreality of time." This title is not a book but an article…
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On Spending Time
What will you buy with the time you spend? And will you be able to justify your purchases should you be called to account?
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Dubious Compensation
Memory compensates us for the passage of time, but it also ensures that we will never forget that we are subject to it. Yet better to be a man than an animal held hostage to the passing moment but oblivious of the fact.
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Another Example of Awful Science Journalism
My first example is here. Read it for context and for some necessary distinctions. Now for a second example. Adam Frank writes, For Smolin there is no timeless world and there are no timeless laws. Time, he says, is real and nothing can escape it. Time, of course, seems real to us. We live in…
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Actualist and Presentist Ersatzism and Arguments Against Both
For the actualist, the actual alone exists: the unactual, whether merely possible or impossible, does not exist. The actualist is not pushing platitudes: he is not telling us that the actual alone is actual or that the merely possible is not actual. 'Merely possible' just means 'possible but not actual.' The actualist is saying something non-platitudinous, something…
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Times as Maximal Propositions
1. Here are three temporal platitudes: The wholly past is no longer present; the wholly future is not yet present; the present alone is present. Here are three closely related controversial metaphysical theses: the wholly past, being no longer is not; the wholly future, being not yet, is not; the present alone is. The second trio…
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Presentism and Existence Simpliciter: Questions for Rhoda
For Alan Rhoda, "Presentism is the metaphysical thesis that whatever exists, exists now, in the present. The past is no more. The future is not yet. Either something exists now, or it does not exist, period." Rhoda goes on to claim that presentism is "arguably the common sense position." I will first comment on whether…
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Still Puzzling Over Presentism
The presentist aims to restrict what exists in time to what exists in time now. Call this the presentist restriction. But if the presentist says that only what exists now, exists, he cannot possibly mean that only what exists at the time of his utterance or thought of the presentist thesis exists. If it is now…
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Common Ground Between Presentist and Anti-Presentist?
What the presentist affirms, roughly, is that only (temporally) present items exist: there are no nonpresent existents. The anti-presentist denies this, maintaining that there are nonpresent existents. Now there is no genuine dispute here unless the identity of the presentist thesis is perfectly clear and the anti-present is denying that very thesis. Following some earlier suggestions of…
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Five Time-Related Senses of ‘Is’
I dedicate this post to that loveable rascal Bill Clinton who taught us just how much can ride on what the meaning of 'is' is. Credit where credit is due: Some of the inspiration for this post comes from a conversation with Peter Lupu and from an article he recommended, S. Savitt, Presentism and Eternalism…
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Abstracta: Omnitemporal or Timeless? An Argument from McCann
Is everything in time? Or are there timeless entities? So-called abstracta are held by many to be timeless. Among abstracta we find numbers, (abstract as opposed to concrete) states of affairs, mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) sets, and Fregean (as opposed to Russellian) propositions, where a Fregean proposition is the sense of an indexical-free sentence…