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Full Idea
There is no reason in experience to suppose that there are times as opposed to events: the events, ordered by the relations of simultaneity and succession, are all that experience provides.
Gist of Idea
We never experience times, but only succession of events
Source
Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World [1914], 4)
Book Ref
Russell,Bertrand: 'Our Knowledge of the External World' [Routledge 1993], p.122
A Reaction
We experience events, but also have quite an accurate sense of how much time has passed during the occurrence of events. If asked how much time has lapsed, why don't we say '32 events'? How do we distinguish long events from short ones?
314 | Heavenly movements gave us the idea of time, and caused us to inquire about the heavens [Plato] |
5103 | Time is not change, but requires change in our minds to be noticed [Aristotle] |
5698 | We can only sense time by means of movement, or its absence [Lucretius] |
5978 | I know what time is, until someone asks me to explain it [Augustine] |
2101 | If everything in the universe happened a year earlier, there would be no discernible difference [Leibniz] |
5535 | That times cannot be simultaneous is synthetic, so it is known by intuition, not analysis [Kant] |
5560 | The three modes of time are persistence, succession and simultaneity [Kant] |
8591 | There could be no time if nothing changed [McTaggart] |
21581 | We never experience times, but only succession of events [Russell] |
24204 | The past is known to us but unreachable - a perfect image of eternal, supernatural reality [Weil] |
22993 | For abstractionists past times might still exist, althought their objects don't [Baron/Miller] |
23001 | The error theory of time's passage says it is either a misdescription or a false inference [Baron/Miller] |