display all the ideas for this combination of texts
7 ideas
| 1696 | Change goes from possession to loss (as in baldness), but not the other way round [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Change occurs from possession to privation, but from privation to possession is impossible; one who has gone blind does not recover sight nor does a bald man regain his hair nor does a toothless man grow new ones. | |
| From: Aristotle (Categories [c.331 BCE], 13a35) | |
| A reaction: Although this seems like an insight into entropy, it isn't an accurate observation, since trees lose their leaves, and then regain them in spring. Maybe somewhere men regrow their hair each spring. |
| 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) |
| 16264 | I believe the passing of time is a fundamental fact about the world [Maudlin] |
| Full Idea: I believe that it is a fundamental, irreducible fact about the spatio-temporal structure of the world that time passes. | |
| From: Tim Maudlin (The Metaphysics within Physics [2007], 4) | |
| A reaction: Worth quoting because it comes from a philosopher fully informed about, and heavily committed to, the physicist's approach to reality. One fears that physicists steeped in Einstein are all B-series Eternalists. Get a life! |
| 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. |
| 16265 | If time passes, presumably it passes at one second per second [Maudlin] |
| Full Idea: It is necessary and, I suppose, a priori that if time passes at all it passes at one second per second. …Similarly, the fair exchange rate for a dollar must be a dollar. | |
| From: Tim Maudlin (The Metaphysics within Physics [2007], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: [He is discussing Huw Price on time] This is a reply to the claim that if time passes it has to pass at some rate, and 'one second per second' is ridiculous. Not very convincing, even with the dollar analogy. |
| 16266 | There is one ordered B series, but an infinitude of A series, depending on when the present is [Maudlin] |
| Full Idea: Given events ordered in a B series, one defines an infinitude of different A series that correspond to taking different events as 'now' or 'present'. McTaggart talks of 'the A series' when there is an infinitude of such. | |
| From: Tim Maudlin (The Metaphysics within Physics [2007], 4.3 n11) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as a rather mathematical (and distorted) claim about the A series view. The A-series is one dynamic happening. Not an infinity of static times lines, each focused on a different 'now'. |