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3 ideas
| 19673 | Galileo mathematised movement, and revealed its invariable component - acceleration [Galileo, by Meillassoux] |
| Full Idea: Galileo conceives of movement in mathematical terms. ...In doing so, he uncovered, beyond the variations of position and speed, the mathematical invariant of movement - that is to say, acceleration. | |
| From: report of Galileo Galilei (Two Chief World Systems [1632]) by Quentin Meillassoux - After Finitude; the necessity of contingency 5 | |
| A reaction: That is a very nice advert for the mathematical physics which replaced the Aristotelian substantial forms. ...And yet, is acceleration some deep fact about nature, or a concept which is only needed if you insist on being mathematical? |
| 15203 | Tense is essential for thought and action [Perry, by Le Poidevin] |
| Full Idea: Tense plays a crucial role in thought and action. | |
| From: report of John Perry (The Problem of the Essential Indexical [1979]) by Robin Le Poidevin - Past, Present and Future of Debate about Tense 3 a | |
| A reaction: This is important, because much of our metaphysics is dominated by a detached 'scientific' description of reality, which is given a rather passive character. If processes take centre stage, which they should, then our own processes are part of it. |
| 15204 | Actual tensed sentences cannot be tenseless, because they can cite their own context [Perry, by Le Poidevin] |
| Full Idea: In the new tenseless theory, no tensed token sentence can be equivalent to a tenseless token, because the former, unlike the latter, draws attention to the context in which it is tokened. | |
| From: report of John Perry (The Problem of the Essential Indexical [1979]) by Robin Le Poidevin - Past, Present and Future of Debate about Tense 3 a | |
| A reaction: So the problem about indexicals was worrying fans of the tenseless B-series view of time (and so it should). I'm inclined to translate sentences containing indexicals into their actual propositions, which tend to avoid them. 'Time/person of utterance'. |