Aspects of Time, Misc

Zur Aufklärung der vielschichtigen Beziehungen zwischen Lebenswelt und Physik diskutiere ich die für die beiden Erfahrungsweisen jeweils typischen Konzeptualisierungen von Zeit. Nach einer Einleitung beginne ich mit der Analyse der subjektiven und objektiven lebensweltlichen Zeitformen. Anschließend erörtere ich im dritten Abschnitt das Verhältnis von lebensweltlichen und physikalischen Elementen der Weltzeit. Vier physikalische Zeitverständnisse stelle ich in ihrer Differenz zur lebensweltlichen Auffassung im vierten Abschnitt dar. Historisch hat sich die generelle Tendenz zur Vergrößerung dieser Differenz fortgesetzt, ohne dass schon Instanzen zur (...) Vermittlung der divergierenden Begriffe entstanden wären. Vor diesem Hintergrund plädiere ich im abschließenden Teil für eine plurale Begrifflichkeit. (shrink)

John Ellis McTaggart defended an idealistic view of time in the tradition of Hegel and Bradley. His famous paper makes two independent claims (McTaggart1908): First, time is a complex conception with two different logical roots. Second, time is unreal. To reject the second claim seems to commit to the first one, i.e., to a pluralistic account of time. We compare McTaggarts views to the most important concepts of time investigated in physics, neurobiology, and philosophical phenomenology. They indicate that a unique, (...) reductionist account of time is far from being plausible, even though too many conceptions of time may seem unsatisfactory from an ontological point of view. (shrink)

Across a wide range of cultural forms, including philosophy, cultural theory, literature and art, the figure of the clock has drawn suspicion, censure and outright hostility. In contrast, even while maps have been shown to be complicit with forms of domination, they are also widely recognised as tools that can be critically reworked in the service of more liberatory ends. This paper seeks to counteract the tendency to see clocks in this way, arguing that they have many more interesting possibilities (...) than they are usually given credit for. An analysis of approaches to clocks in continental philosophy critiques the way they have too often been dismissed as unworthy of further analysis, and argues that this dismissal is based upon an inadequate understanding of how clocks operate. Seeking to move towards more critical and curious approaches, the paper draws inspiration from critical cartography in order to call for the development of a ‘critical horology’ which would emphasise both the fundamentally political nature of clocks, and the potential for designing them otherwise. A discussion of temporal design provides a range of examples of how clocks might open up new horizons within the politics of time. (shrink)

The Emergic Cognitive Model (ECM) is a unified computational model of visual filling-in based on the Emergic Network architecture. The Emergic Network was designed to help realize systems undergoing continuous change. In this thesis, eight different filling-in phenomena are demonstrated under a regime of continuous eye movement (and under static eye conditions as well). -/- ECM indirectly demonstrates the power of unification inherent with Emergic Networks when cognition is decomposed according to finer-grained functions supporting change. These can interact to raise (...) additional emergent behaviours via cognitive re-use, hence the Emergic prefix throughout. Nevertheless, the model is robust and parameter free. Differential re-use occurs in the nature of model interaction with a particular testing paradigm. -/- ECM has a novel decomposition due to the requirements of handling motion and of supporting unified modelling via finer functional grains. The breadth of phenomenal behaviour covered is largely to lend credence to our novel decomposition. -/- The Emergic Network architecture is a hybrid between classical connectionism and classical computationalism that facilitates the construction of unified cognitive models. It helps cutting up of functionalism into finer-grains distributed over space (by harnessing massive recurrence) and over time (by harnessing continuous change), yet simplifies by using standard computer code to focus on the interaction of information flows. Thus while the structure of the network looks neurocentric, the dynamics are best understood in flowcentric terms. Surprisingly, dynamic system analysis (as usually understood) is not involved. An Emergic Network is engineered much like straightforward software or hardware systems that deal with continuously varying inputs. Ultimately, this thesis addresses the problem of reduction and induction over complex systems, and the Emergic Network architecture is merely a tool to assist in this epistemic endeavour. -/- ECM is strictly a sensory model and apart from perception, yet it is informed by phenomenology. It addresses the attribution problem of how much of a phenomenon is best explained at a sensory level of analysis, rather than at a perceptual one. As the causal information flows are stable under eye movement, we hypothesize that they are the locus of consciousness, howsoever it is ultimately realized. (shrink)

The grounding objection to presentism rests on two premises: (i) every true proposition P has a truthmaker T, and (ii) some claims about the future and past are obviously true. However, if the future and past do not exist, there can be no truthmakers for future and past tensed expressions. Presentists tend not to challenge the premises of the objection. Instead they argue that the present contains all the truthmakers we need. Presentists should challenge the premises instead. First, finding truthmakers (...) in the present only results in the postulation of implausible and/or ethereal entities that ultimately fail to solve the grounding objection. Second, no manifestly absurd consequences follow from accepting the lack of truth-values for tensed expressions. Third, the grounding objection does not just require the assumption that for every truth there is a truthmaker, but also that for every truthmaker there is a truth. I show how one can deny the latter without denying the former. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement, even among those who accept the possibility of backward causation, that it is impossible to change the past. I argue that this agreement corresponds to a relatively uninteresting understanding of what changing the past amounts to. In one sense it is indeed impossible to change the past: in no possible world is an action performed which makes the past in that world different from the past in that world. In another sense, however, it may be possible (...) to change the past: maybe in some possible world an action is performed which makes the past in that world different from the actual past. I argue that those who accept the possibility of backward causation are committed to accepting the possibility that the past changes in the latter sense. (shrink)

I describe a thought experiment in which an agent must choose between suffering a greater pain in the past or a lesser pain in the future. This case demonstrates that the ‘temporal value asymmetry’ – our disposition to attribute greater significance to future pleasures and pains than to past – can have consequences for the rationality of actions as well as attitudes. This fact, I argue, blocks attempts to vindicate the temporal value asymmetry as a useful heuristic tied to the (...) asymmetry of causation. Since the two standard arguments for the rationality of the temporal value asymmetry appeal to causal asymmetry and the passage of time respectively, the failure of the causal asymmetry explanation suggests that the B-theory, which rejects temporal passage, has substantial revisionary implications concerning our attitudes toward past and future experience. (shrink)

In recent European philosophy, and especially in Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, and Badiou, the distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary, or between normality and “event,” has played a very prominent role. In the present paper, I raise a challenge to this distinction, a challenge inspired by Deleuze’s conception of repetition and difference. Is it not the case that every occurrence in some ways reproduces and in some ways deviates from the past, such that nothing is entirely extraordinary and nothing completely (...) normal? The purpose of the paper is to examine whether the ordinary/extraordinary distinction—or the notion of event, respectively—can be defended against this challenge, i.e., whether it can be given a rigorous definition. Drawing on and departing from the named philosophers, I show that there are three alternative responses—the route of subjective experience, of transcendence, and of negation—and assess their respective merits. (shrink)

In this essay, I first set out the principles of change, paying particular attention to the need for a support for all changes and to the need for prime matter. I then discuss the nature of time, arguing that time is not actually composed of durationless instants but that instants can be understood as limits to an infinite process of potential division. I then give a definition of instants in terms of intervals and propose a way of modeling them. In (...) the next section I bring together the two previous sections by explaining change as an instantaneous process that does not involve actual instants. In the final section I draw out a larger metaphysical moral that emphasizes the role of potentiality and sees the potentiality in change and the potentiality in time as but different aspects of the same radical potentiality in nature. (shrink)

In this paper I show that the existence of an infinite temporal regress does not undermine the soundness of Craigs version of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. To this end I shall focus on a particular complication that Craig raises against one of his arguments in support of a finite temporal regress. I will show that this complication can be made innocuous by extending the notion of A-theoretic time, which is presupposed by Craigs argument, to include a notion of temporal becoming (...) that is compatible with the existence of an infinite regress of temporal events. All this shows that God could have created an infinite temporal regress a finite time in the past without this entailing a contradiction. (shrink)

God is the ‘high and lofty One who inhabits eternity’, declared the prophet Isaiah, but exactly how we are to understand the notion of eternity is not clear. Traditionally, the Christian church has taken it to mean ‘timeless’. But in his classic work on this subject, Oscar Cullmann has contended that the New Testament ‘does not make a philosophical, qualitative distinction between time and eternity. It knows linear time only…’ He maintains, ‘Primitive Christianity knows nothing of a timeless God. The (...) “eternal” God is he who was in the beginning, is now, and will be in all the future, “who is, who was, and who will be” .’ As a result, God's eternity, says Cullmann, must be expressed in terms of endless time. (shrink)

What might early Buddhist teachings offer neuroscience and how might neuroscience inform contemporary Buddhism? Both early Buddhist teachings and cognitive neuroscience suggest that the conditioning of our cognitive apparatus and brain plays a role in agency that may be either efficacious or non-efficacious. Both consider internal time to play a central role in the efficacy of agency. Buddhism offers an approach that promises to increase the efficacy of agency. This approach is found in five early Buddhist teachings that are re-interpreted (...) here with a view to explaining how they might be understood as a dynamic basis for ‘participatory will’ in the context of existing free will debates and the neuroscientific work of Patrick Haggard. These perspectives offer Buddhism and neuroscience a basis for informing each other as the shared themes of: cognition is dynamic and complex/aggregate based, being dynamic, cognition lacks a fixed basis of efficacy, and efficacy of cognition may be achieved by an understanding of the concept of dynamic: as harmony and efficiency and by means of Buddha-warranted processes that involve internal time. (shrink)

In this chapter we argue that our concept of time is a functional concept. We argue that our concept of time is such that time is whatever it is that plays the time role, and we spell out what we take the time role to consist in. We evaluate this proposal against a number of other analyses of our concept of time, and argue that it better explains various features of our dispositions as speakers and our practices as agents.

William Lane Craig has revived interest in the medieval kalām argument to the point where it is now one of the most discussed arguments for God’s existence in the secondary literature. Still, the reception of Craig’s argument among philosophers of religion has been mostly critical. In the interest of developing an argument that more philosophers of religion would be inclined to support, I will lay the philosophical groundwork for a new kalām cosmological argument that, in contrast with Craig’s argument, does (...) not adopt such controversial positions as the dynamic theory of time and the metaphysical impossibility of an actual infinite. (shrink)

Book Information Travels in Four Dimensions: The Enigmas of Space and Time. Travels in Four Dimensions: The Enigmas of Space and Time Robin Le Poidevin , Oxford : Clarendon Press , 2003 , xvii + 275 , £14.99 ( cloth ); £8.99 ( paper ) By Robin Le Poidevin. Clarendon Press. Oxford. Pp. xvii + 275. £14.99 (cloth:); £8.99 (paper:).

We all think we know the difference between past and future, but philosophers and scientists have never been entirely successful in putting their finger on this difference. The problem is complicated by the fact that there are at least two quite distinct ways of considering time, and that the difference between the future and the past depends on which way we adopt. These ways are two distinct views of the changes that occur in the world. Briefly, the first view sees (...) past, present and future changes. and the second view sees changes at particular dates and times. This distinction has been the subject of numerous discussions since then. It is still not clear to us which view of time is the better: we do not really know which is the more fundamental, and even whether either of these approaches is strictly consistent in the first place. (shrink)

The concept of absolute time is a hypothetical model from the laws of classical physics postulated by Isaac Newton in the Principia in 1687. Although the Newtonian model of absolute time has since been opposed and rejected in light of more recent scholarship, it still provides a way to study science with reference to time and understand the phenomena of time within the scientific tradition. According to this model, it is assumed that time runs at the same rate for all (...) the observers in the universe, or in other words, the rate of time of each observer can be scaled to the absolute time by multiplying the rate by a constant. This concept of absolute time suggests absolute simultaneity by the coincidence of two or more events at different points in space for all observers in the universe. So, absolute time has been discussed in two senses of absoluteness. In first sense, absoluteness means independent of events, while in second sense, it means independent of observer or frame of reference. (shrink)

The publication of Frege’s Begriffsschrift in 1879 forever altered the landscape for many Western philosophers. Here, Sebastian Rödl traces how the Fregean influence, written all over the development and present state of analytic philosophy, led into an unholy alliance of an empiricist conception of sensibility with an inferentialist conception of thought. -/- According to Rödl, Wittgenstein responded to the implosion of Frege’s principle that the nature of thought consists in its inferential order, but his Philosophical Investigations shied away from offering (...) an alternative. Rödl takes up the challenge by turning to Kant and Aristotle as ancestors of this tradition, and in doing so identifies its unacknowledged question: the relation of judgment and truth to time. Rödl finds in the thought of these two men the answer he urges us to consider: the temporal and the sensible, and the atemporal and the intelligible, are aspects of one reality and cannot be understood independently of one another. In demonstrating that an investigation into the categories of the temporal can be undertaken as a contribution to logic, Rödl seeks to transform simultaneously our philosophical understanding of both logic and time. (shrink)

Many traditional theists have said that God is propositionally omniscient, i.e. knows all truths. Many traditional theists also hold that God is timeless. That is, these theists hold that though God exists, there is no time at which He exists, and He does not exist earlier or later than anything. Some recent philosophers, among them Arthor Prior, Robert Coburn, Norman Kretz mann, Nicholas Wolterstorfl Richard Gale and Patrick Grim, have argued that There are truths to whose expression ‘now’ is essential, (...) and that – compose an inconsistent set of propositions. These writers argue that due to the semantics of ‘now’, a timeless God cannot know truths to whose expression ‘now’ is essential. To know a truth, it is claimed, one must be able to mentally token a proposition expressing what one knows. To token a truth to whose expression ‘now’ is essential, one must token ‘now’. ‘Now’ and relevantly similar terms inter alia locate those who use them in time: if one says truly that it is now 3 p.m., it follows that one exists at 3 p.m. So a timeless being cannot use ‘now’ and relevantly similar terms, and so cannot know truths for whose expression ‘now’ and its ilk are required. (shrink)

Much of ordinary memory is autobiographical; memory of what one saw and did, where and when. It may derive from your own past experiences, or from what other people told you about your past life. It may be phenomenologically rich, redolent of that autumn afternoon so long ago, or a few austere reports of what happened. But all autobiographical memory is first-person memory, stateable using ‘I’. It is a memory you would express by saying, ‘I remember I . . .’.

This volume presents selected essays from the 13th triennial conference of the International Society for the Study of Time: "Time: Limits and Constraints.

Dummett in his recent paper in Philosophy replies in the negative to the question, “Is time a continuum of instants?” But Dummett seems to think that this negative reply entails giving an alternative theoretical account; he nowhere canvasses the possibility that there is something amiss with the question. In other words, Dummett thinks that he still has to reply to the question, “What (then) is time?” I offer no answer whatsover to such ‘questions’. Rather, I ask what it could possibly (...) mean to say that time is (e.g.) a continuum of instants (and by extension, whether it can mean anything at all to assert that it isn't). In the course of doing so, I suggest that Dummett's ‘Anti-Realism’ is invariably a form of Realism, just a subtly inconsistent form. Anti-Realism keeps the fundamental metaphysical picture of Realism intact. Anti-Realism still thinks that there is a Reality...settling whether Realism or Anti-Realism is correct! ‘Anti-Realism’ is never anti-Realist enough. (shrink)

Richard Sorabji here takes time as his central theme, exploring fundamental questions about its nature: Is it real or an aspect of consciousness? Did it begin along with the universe? Can anything escape from it? Does it come in atomic chunks? In addressing these and myriad other issues, Sorabji engages in an illuminating discussion of early thought about time, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Islamic, Christian, and Jewish medieval thinkers. Sorabji argues that the thought of these often negelected philosophers (...) about the subject is, in many cases, more complete than that of their more recent counterparts. “Splendid. . . . The canvas is vast, the picture animated, the painter nonpareil. . . . Sorabji’s work will encourage more adventurers to follow him to this fascinating new-found land.”—Jonathan Barnes, Times Literary Supplement “One of the most important works in the history of metaphysics to appear in English for a considerable time. No one concerned with the problems with which it deals either as a historian of ideas or as a philosopher can afford to neglect it.”—Donald MacKinnon, Scottish Journal of Theology “Unusually readable for such scholarly content, the book provides in rich and cogent terms a lively and well-balanced discussion of matters of concern to a wide academic audience.”— Choice. (shrink)

Time and the body -- Time and the mind -- Time and culture -- Time in our time.