display all the ideas for this combination of texts
4 ideas
| 14991 | Space has real betweenness and congruence structure (though it is not the Euclidean concepts) [Sider] |
| Full Idea: In metaphysics, space is intrinsically structured; the genuine betweenness and congruence relations are privileged in a way that Euclidean-betweenness and Euclidean-congruence are not. | |
| From: Theodore Sider (Writing the Book of the World [2011], 03.4) | |
| A reaction: I note that Einstein requires space to be 'curved', which implies that it is a substance with properties. |
| 15021 | The central question in the philosophy of time is: How alike are time and space? [Sider] |
| Full Idea: The central question in the philosophy of time is: How alike are time and space? | |
| From: Theodore Sider (Writing the Book of the World [2011], 11.1) |
| 15024 | The spotlight theorists accepts eternal time, but with a spotlight of the present moving across it [Sider] |
| Full Idea: The spotlight theorist accepts the block universe, but also something in addition: a joint-carving monadic property of presentness, which is possessed by just one moment of time, and which 'moves', to be possessed by later and later times. | |
| From: Theodore Sider (Writing the Book of the World [2011], 11.9) | |
| A reaction: This seems better than the merely detached eternalist view, which seems to ignore the key phenomenon. I just can't comprehend any theory which makes the future as real as the past. |
| 14801 | Darwinian evolution is chance, with the destruction of bad results [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Darwinian evolution is evolution by the operation of chance, and the destruction of bad results. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (The Architecture of Theories [1891], p.320) | |
| A reaction: The 'destruction of bad results' is a much better slogan for Darwin that Spencer's 'survival of the fittest'. It is, of course, a rather unattractive God who makes progress by endlessly destroying huge quantities of failed (but living) experiments. |