Summary
The paper discusses the concept of the present moment ‘now’. Two views regarding the nature of the ‘now’, held by A. Grünbaum and G. J. Whitrow, resp., are contrasted in Part I. Grünbaum believes that the becoming of the present moment is totally subjective and observer-dependent, while Whitrow thinks that it has objective reality and that the moment ‘now’ is uniquely the same for the whole universe and marks a, qualitative change between the actuality of the past and the potentiality of the future.
In Part II the question is raised — and rejected — whether the discrepancy is only a linguistic one. Both views are criticised, the first for its extreme subjectivism, the other for deriving ontological consequences from the accidental positioning of an observer. Part III attempts a dissolution of the disagreement by showing that the dichotomy derives from the notion of a static world, to which time is added as an extra dimension, while it does not arise from an Einsteinian-type description of the universe as dynamic.
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References
William James: Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, p. 609.
Grünbaum, A.: The Status of Temporal Becoming. In: Interdisciplinary Perspectives of Time, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 138, Art. 2, Feb. 1967. pp. 374–395. (Reprinted in: Modern Science and Zeno’s Paradoxes, London: Allen & Unwin 1968. Chapter I.)
Grünbaum, A.: The Status of Temporal Becoming. In: Interdisciplinary Perspectives of Time, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 138, Art. 2, Feb. 1967. Ibid., p. 381.
Whitrow, G. J.: Reflections on the Natural Philosophy of Time. In: Interdisciplinary Perspectives of Time, pp. 422–432.
Henryk Mehlberg, Proc. Congress Philos. Sci., Jerusalem (1964), passim.
Bergmann, H.: Der Kampf um das Kausalgesetz in der jüngsten Physik (1929), as cited by Whitrow and Grünbaum.
Whitrow, loc. cit., p. 422.
Cf. Ayer, A. J.: The observer’s special point of view… In: Problems of Knowledge, London, 1963. Passim.
Whitrow, loc. cit., 3 p. 425/6.
Wittgenstein, L.: Tractates Logico-Philosophicus, (1922) (1. “The world is everything that is the case.”)
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© 1972 Springer-Verlag, Berlin · Heidelberg
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Cassirer, E. (1972). On the Reality of Becoming. In: Fraser, J.T., Haber, F.C., Müller, G.H. (eds) The Study of Time. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-65387-2_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-65387-2_25
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