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Full Idea
Those who decide in favour of the subsistence of the absolute reality of space and time must assume two eternal and infinite self-subsisting non-entities which exist (without there being anything real) only to comprehend everything real within themselves.
Gist of Idea
If space and time exist absolutely, we must assume the existence of two pointless non-entities
Source
Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B056/A39)
Book Ref
Kant,Immanuel: 'Critique of Pure Reason', ed/tr. Guyer,P /Wood,A W [CUO 1998], p.166
A Reaction
This is an attack on Newton, and modern physics seems (thanks to Einstein) to agree with Kant. However the modern view strikes me as the usual confusion of epistemology and ontology. Physicists report what we can know, without speculation about how it is.
| 14525 | Stoics say time is incorporeal and self-sufficient; Epicurus says it is a property of properties of things [Epicurus] |
| 13311 | Does time exist on its own? Did anything precede it? Did it pre-exist the cosmos? [Seneca] |
| 22915 | Newton needs intervals of time, to define velocity and acceleration [Newton, by Le Poidevin] |
| 22893 | Newton thought his laws of motion needed absolute time [Newton, by Bardon] |
| 17012 | Time exists independently, and flows uniformly [Newton] |
| 14012 | Absolute time, from its own nature, flows equably, without relation to anything external [Newton] |
| 5536 | If space and time exist absolutely, we must assume the existence of two pointless non-entities [Kant] |
| 16921 | If all empirical sensation of bodies is removed, space and time are still left [Kant] |
| 24141 | Having a sense of time presupposes absolute time [Nietzsche] |
| 12689 | Simultaneity can be temporal equidistance from the Big Bang [Ellis] |
| 18279 | Relativity is as absolutist about space-time as Newton was about space [Coffa] |
| 16264 | I believe the passing of time is a fundamental fact about the world [Maudlin] |
| 14013 | Special Relativity allows an absolute past, future, elsewhere and simultaneity [Bourne] |