display all the ideas for this combination of texts
5 ideas
| 6735 | All motion is relative, so a single body cannot move [Berkeley] |
| Full Idea: There cannot be any motion other than relative; …if there was one only body in being it could not possibly move. | |
| From: George Berkeley (The Principles of Human Knowledge [1710], §112) | |
| A reaction: This seems to agree with with Leibniz in denying the Newton-Clarke idea of absolute space. See Idea 2100. Suppose there were two bodies racing towards one another, when one of them suddenly vanished? |
| 6733 | I cannot imagine time apart from the flow of ideas in my mind [Berkeley] |
| Full Idea: Whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea of time, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly and is participated in by all beings, I am lost and embrangled in inextricable difficulties. | |
| From: George Berkeley (The Principles of Human Knowledge [1710], §98) | |
| A reaction: 'Embrangled'! A nice statement of the idealist view of time, as entirely mental. I know what he means. However, surely he can manage to imagine a movement which continues when he shuts he eyes? Try blinking during a horse race. |
| 20819 | The past and the future subsist, but only the present exists [Chrysippus, by Plutarch] |
| Full Idea: When he wished to be subtle, Chrysippus wrote that the past part of time and the future part do not exist but subsist, and only the present exists. | |
| From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Plutarch - On Common Conceptions 1081f | |
| A reaction: [from lost On Void] I think I prefer the ontology of Idea 20818. Idea 20819 does not offer an epistemology. Is the present substantial enough to be known? The word 'subsist' is an ontological evasion (even though Russell briefly relied on it). |
| 20818 | The present does not exist, so our immediate experience is actually part past and part future [Chrysippus, by Plutarch] |
| Full Idea: Stoics do not allow a minimal time to exist, and do not want to have a partless 'now'; so what one thinks one has grasped as present is in part future and in part past. | |
| From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Plutarch - On Common Conceptions 1081c | |
| A reaction: [from lost On Parts Bk3-5] I agree with the ontology here, but I take our grasp of the present to be very short-term memory of the past. I ignore special relativity. Chrysippus expressed two views about this; in the other one he was a Presentist. |
| 20821 | Time is continous and infinitely divisible, so there cannot be a wholly present time [Chrysippus, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: Chrysippus says most clearly that no time is wholly present; for since the divisibility of continuous things is infinite, time as a whole is also subject to infinite divisibility by this method of division. | |
| From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 1.08.42 | |
| A reaction: But what is his reason for thinking that time is a continuous thing? There is a minimum time in quantum mechanics (the Planck Time), but do these quantum intervals overlap? Compare Idea 20819. |