47 ideas
| 9821 | A definition need not capture the sense of an expression - just get the reference right [Frege, by Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Frege expressly denies that a correct definition need capture the sense of the expression it defines: it need only get the reference right. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894]) by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: This might hit up against the renate/cordate problem, of two co-extensive concepts, where the definition gets the extension right, but the intension wrong. |
| 9585 | Since every definition is an equation, one cannot define equality itself [Frege] |
| Full Idea: Since every definition is an equation, one cannot define equality itself. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894], p.327) | |
| A reaction: This seems a particularly nice instance of the general rule that 'you have to start somewhere'. It is a nice test case for the nature of meaning to ask 'what do you understand when you understand equality?', given that you can't define it. |
| 17446 | Counting rests on one-one correspondence, of numerals to objects [Frege] |
| Full Idea: Counting rests itself on a one-one correlation, namely of numerals 1 to n and the objects. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894]), quoted by Richard G. Heck - Cardinality, Counting and Equinumerosity 3 | |
| A reaction: Parsons observes that counting will establish a one-one correspondence, but that doesn't make it the aim of counting, and so Frege hasn't answered Husserl properly. Which of the two is conceptually prior? How do you decide. |
| 9582 | Husserl rests sameness of number on one-one correlation, forgetting the correlation with numbers themselves [Frege] |
| Full Idea: When Husserl says that sameness of number can be shown by one-one correlation, he forgets that this counting itself rests on a univocal one-one correlation, namely that between the numerals 1 to n and the objects of the set. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894], p.326) | |
| A reaction: This is the platonist talking. Neo-logicism is attempting to build numbers just from the one-one correlation of objects. |
| 9586 | In a number-statement, something is predicated of a concept [Frege] |
| Full Idea: In a number-statement, something is predicated of a concept. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894], p.328) | |
| A reaction: A succinct statement of Frege's theory of numbers. By my lights that would make numbers at least second-order abstractions. |
| 9580 | Our concepts recognise existing relations, they don't change them [Frege] |
| Full Idea: The bringing of an object under a concept is merely the recognition of a relation which previously already obtained, [but in the abstractionist view] objects are essentially changed by the process, so that objects brought under a concept become similar. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894], p.324) | |
| A reaction: Frege's view would have to account for occasional misapplications of concepts, like taking a dolphin to be a fish, or falsely thinking there is someone in the cellar. |
| 9589 | Numbers are not real like the sea, but (crucially) they are still objective [Frege] |
| Full Idea: The sea is something real and a number is not; but this does not prevent it from being something objective; and that is the important thing. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894], p.337) | |
| A reaction: This seems a qualification of Frege's platonism. It is why people start talking about abstract items which 'subsist', instead of 'exist'. It shows Frege's motivation in all this, which is to secure logic and maths from the vagaries of psychology. |
| 9577 | The naïve view of number is that it is like a heap of things, or maybe a property of a heap [Frege] |
| Full Idea: The most naïve opinion of number is that it is something like a heap in which things are contained. The next most naïve view is the conception of number as the property of a heap, cleansing the objects of their particulars. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894], p.323) | |
| A reaction: A hundred toothbrushes and a hundred sponges can be seen to contain the same number (by one-to-one mapping), without actually knowing what that number is. There is something numerical in the heap, even if the number is absent. |
| 9578 | If objects are just presentation, we get increasing abstraction by ignoring their properties [Frege] |
| Full Idea: If an object is just presentation, we can pay less attention to a property and it disappears. By letting one characteristic after another disappear, we obtain concepts that are increasingly more abstract. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894], p.324) | |
| A reaction: Frege despises this view. Note there is scope in the despised view for degrees or levels of abstraction, defined in terms of number of properties ignored. Part of Frege's criticism is realist. He retains the object, while Husserl imagines it different. |
| 18658 | The 'Kantian' self steps back from commitment to its social situation [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: The 'Kantian' view of the self strongly defends the view that the self is prior to its socially given roles and relationships, and is free only if it is capable of holding these features of its social situation at a distance, and judging them by reason. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 6.3) | |
| A reaction: There is no correct answer here, because I am capable of Kantian distancing, and also capable of submersing myself in the social constructions around me. If society fosters rebellion (1810s, 1960s) then we become more Kantian. |
| 9581 | Many people have the same thought, which is the component, not the private presentation [Frege] |
| Full Idea: The same thought can be grasped by many people. The components of a thought, and even more so the things themselves, must be distinguished from the presentations which in the soul accompany the grasping of a thought. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894], p.325) | |
| A reaction: This is the basic realisation, also found in Russell, of how so much confusion has crept into philosophy, in Berkeley, for example. Frege starts down the road which leads to the externalist view of content. |
| 9579 | Disregarding properties of two cats still leaves different objects, but what is now the difference? [Frege] |
| Full Idea: If from a black cat and a white cat we disregard colour, then posture, then location, ..we finally derive something which is completely without restrictions on content; but what is derived from the objects does differ, although it is not easy to say how. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894], p.324) | |
| A reaction: This is a key objection to abstractionism for Frege - we are counting two cats, not two substrata of essential catness, or whatever. But what makes a cat countable? (Key question!) It isn't its colour, or posture or location. |
| 9587 | How do you find the right level of inattention; you eliminate too many or too few characteristics [Frege] |
| Full Idea: Inattention is a very strong lye which must not be too concentrated, or it dissolves everything (such as the connection between the objects), but must not be too weak, to produce sufficient change. Personally I cannot find the proper dilution. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894], p.330) | |
| A reaction: We may sympathise with the lack of precision here (frustrating for a logician), but it is not difficult to say of a baseball defence 'just concentrate on the relations, and ignore the individuals who implement it'. You retain basic baseball skills. |
| 9588 | Number-abstraction somehow makes things identical without changing them! [Frege] |
| Full Idea: Number-abstraction simply has the wonderful and very fruitful property of making things absolutely the same as one another without altering them. Something like this is possible only in the psychological wash-tub. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894], p.332) | |
| A reaction: Frege can be awfully sarcastic. I don't really see his difficulty. For mathematics we only need to know what is countable about an object - we don't need to know how many hairs there are on the cat, only that it has identity. |
| 9583 | Psychological logicians are concerned with sense of words, but mathematicians study the reference [Frege] |
| Full Idea: The psychological logicians are concerned with the sense of the words and with the presentations, which they do not distinguish from the sense; but the mathematicians are concerned with the matter itself, with the reference of the words. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894], p.326) | |
| A reaction: This is helpful for showing the point of his sense/reference distinction; it is part of his campaign against psychologism, by showing that there is a non-psychological component to language - the reference, where it meets the public world. |
| 9584 | Identity baffles psychologists, since A and B must be presented differently to identify them [Frege] |
| Full Idea: The relation of sameness remains puzzling to a psychological logician. They cannot say 'A is the same as B', because that requires distinguishing A from B, so that these would have to be different presentations. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894], p.327) | |
| A reaction: This is why Frege needed the concept of reference, so that identity could be outside the mind (as in Hesperus = Phosophorus). Think about an electron; now think about a different electron. |
| 6866 | It is disturbing if we become unreal when we die, but if time is unreal, then we remain real after death [Le Poidevin] |
| Full Idea: For the A-theorists called 'presentists' the past is as unreal as the future, and reality leaves us behind once we die, which is disturbing; but B-theorists, who see time as unreal, say we are just as real after our deaths as we were beforehand. | |
| From: Robin Le Poidevin (Interview with Baggini and Stangroom [2001], p.174) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 6865 for A and B theories. I wonder if this problem is only superficially 'disturbing'. Becoming unreal may sound more drastic than becoming dead, but they both sound pretty terminal to me. |
| 18650 | Teleological theories give the good priority over concern for people [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Teleological theories take concern for the good (e.g. freedom or utility) as fundamental, and concern for people as derivative. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 2.4.a.ii) | |
| A reaction: There's a nice fundamental question with which to begin a discussion of value: which matters most - abstract values, or individual people? Placing a collective of people first (Stalinism?) seems to fall between them. |
| 18664 | Maybe the particularist moral thought of women is better than the impartial public thinking of men [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: There is a significant strand of contemporary feminism which argues that we should take seriously women's different morality. ...The particularistic thought women employ is a better morality than the impartial thought men employ in the public sphere. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 7.3) | |
| A reaction: I had taken Particularism to be an offshoot of virtue theory, as promulgated by Jonathan Dancy. Evidently the influence of feminism is strong. Personally I think the world would be a better place if it was run by women. |
| 18624 | Utilitarianism is not a decision-procedure; choice of the best procedure is an open question [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Utilitarianism is essentially a 'standard of rightness', not a 'decision-procedure'. ...It is an open question whether we should employ a utilitarian decision-procedure - indeed, this question itself is to be answered by examining its consequences. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 2.3.b) | |
| A reaction: The point is that the aim is to maximise happiness, and you might do that by just maximising baked bean consumption, and not even thinking about happiness. This idea is labelled 'indirect utilitarianism'. Happiness does seem to be a by-product. |
| 18626 | One view says start with equality, and infer equal weight to interests, and hence maximum utility [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: The first main argument for utilitarianism is that people matter equally, and hence each person's interests should be given equal weight, and hence morally right acts will maximise utility. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 2.4.a) | |
| A reaction: The point is that this starts from the aim of equality, and infers maximum utility as its consequence. Equality has a primitive value. Whenever you dig down to a primitive value in a theory, I just find myself puzzled. What can justify basic equality? |
| 18627 | A second view says start with maximising the good, implying aggregation, and hence equality [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: The second main argument for utilitarianism defines the right in terms of maximising the good, which leads to the utilitarian aggregation standard, which as a mere consequence treats people's interests equally. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 2.4.b) | |
| A reaction: This takes maximum good as a primitive, and arrives at equality as the way to achieve it. So which is more morally fundamental, a maximum of goodness, or human equality? Kymlicka says this idea is too impersonal. |
| 6867 | Existentialism focuses on freedom and self-making, and insertion into the world [Le Poidevin] |
| Full Idea: I take existentialism to be the focus on the freedom and self-making of the human being, and his or her insertion into the world. | |
| From: Robin Le Poidevin (Interview with Baggini and Stangroom [2001], p.222) | |
| A reaction: I take 'self-making' to be the key here. If neuroscientists somehow 'proved' that there was no free will, I don't see that making any difference to existentialism. 'Insertion' seems odd, unless it refers to growing up. |
| 18625 | To maximise utility should we double the population, even if life somewhat deteriorates? [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Morally, should we double the population, even if it means reducing each person's welfare by almost half (since that will still increase overall utility)? | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 2.4.b) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Derek Parfit for this] The key word is 'almost', which ensures a small increase in overall utility. I think this is a particularly good objection to utilitarianism, which aims to maximise an abstraction called 'utility'. |
| 18638 | The difference principles says we must subsidise the costs of other people's choices [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: The difference principle does not make any distinction between chosen and unchosen inequalities, ....but the difference principle requires that some people subsidise the costs of other people's choices. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 3.3.b.2) | |
| A reaction: We do this in education, allowing people to study things in which we can see little point. We subsidise public ceremonies which strike us as ridiculous. |
| 18635 | Social contract theories are usually rejected because there never was such a contract [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Social contract theories have all been subjected to the same criticism - that there never was such a state of nature, or such a contract. Hence neither citizens nor government are bound by it. Contracts only create obligations if they are actually agreed. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: Even if they have been agreed in the past, why should subsequent generations be bound to them? Modern Germans aren't bound by their grandparents' oaths of allegiance to fascism. |
| 18630 | Utilitarianism is no longer a distinctive political position [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Modern utilitarianism, despite its radical heritage, no longer defines a distinctive political position. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 2.6) | |
| A reaction: This is his final sentence on the topic. I suppose utilitarianism exists as a moral theory at too high a level of generality to count as a political theory. |
| 18623 | The quest of the general good is partly undermined by people's past entitlements [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: The existence of past entitlements on the part of particular people partially pre-empts, or constrains, the utilitarian quest to maximise the general good. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 2.3.a) | |
| A reaction: In other words, there is never a clean slate in politics (except in some hideously violent revolution). You might be able to justify to someone a withdrawal of their past entitlements. E.g. confiscating a stolen painting that was bought in ignorance. |
| 18628 | We shouldn't endorse preferences which reject equality, and show prejudice and selfishness [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Equality should enter into the very formation of our preferences. ....Prejudiced and selfish preferences should be excluded from the start, for they already reflect a failure to show equal consideration. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 2.5.b) | |
| A reaction: This is meant to block utilitarian summing of preferences like racism, but it feels like a rather desperate attempt to get righteous liberal values in at the beginning, where they can't be questioned. How can you justify equal respect and treatment? |
| 18629 | Using utilitarian principles to make decisions encourages cold detachment from people [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Acting directly on utilitarian grounds is counter-productive, for it encourages a contingent and detached attitude towards what should be whole-hearted personal and political commitments. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 2.7) | |
| A reaction: I've always seen this as an objection to utilitarianism, but I now see that it is only an objection to the decision procedure. We should be warm-hearted and committed, in the knowledge that this will increase benefits to all. Hm. A bit schizoid. |
| 18637 | Utilitarianism is irrational if it tells you to trade in your rights and resources just for benefits [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Utilitarianism is an irrational choice, for it is rational to ensure your basic rights and resources are protected, even if you thereby lessen your chance of receiving benefits above and beyond the basic goods that you seek to protect. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: [He's discussing Rawls] Utilitarians would obviously respond to this by saying that the rights and resources are needed to protect future benefits, so it would be short-termism to trade them in now. |
| 18663 | Modern liberalism has added personal privacy to our personal social lives [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Modern liberalism is concerned not only to protect the private sphere of social life, but also to carve out a realm within the private sphere where individuals can have privacy. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 7.2.b) | |
| A reaction: Interestingly, he associates this development with the romantic movement, which designated social interaction as public and political, creating a need for true privacy. Privacy is the blessing and blight of the modern world. |
| 18632 | Liberalism tends to give priority to basic liberties [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: One way of differentiating liberalism is that it gives priority to the basic liberties. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 3.1.b) | |
| A reaction: [He is citing Rawls for this] This is not the same as extreme libertarianism, which makes liberty the only priority. The issue would be over which liberties count as 'basic'. Taxation would be a good test case. |
| 18656 | Marxists say liberalism is unjust, because it allows exploitation in the sale of labour [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: The fundamental flaw of liberal justice, Marxists claim, is that it licences the continuation of the worker by the capitalist, since it licences the buying and selling labour. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 5.2.a) | |
| A reaction: I can't see that all sale of labour is exploitation, if (for example) the wage paid was extremely high (maybe even higher than the employer's wage, which is possible). So exploitation involves something more. |
| 18659 | The 'Kantian' view of the self misses the way it is embedded or situated in society [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Communitarians believe that the 'Kantian' view of the self is false, because it ignores the fact that the self is 'embedded' or 'situated' in existing social practices, so that we cannot always stand back and opt out of them. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 6.3) | |
| A reaction: [Hegel and Charles Taylor 1979 seem to be the sources for this] I have several times been told that I am so typical of the culture I arose in that it is almost comical. This was quite disconcerting, but I got used to it, and now I love it. |
| 18660 | Communitarians say we should pay more attention to our history [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Communitarians like to say that political theory should pay more attention to the history of each culture. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 6.4.c) | |
| A reaction: I like this. Kylicka says communitarians tend not to do this, partly because history might reveal an unpleasant basis for present society (such as English country house life benefiting from slavery). The ignorance of history among politicians appals me. |
| 18657 | Communitarian states only encourage fairly orthodox ideas of the good life [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: A communitarian state can and should encourage people to adopt conceptions of the good that conform to the community's way of life, while discouraging conceptions of the good that conflict with it. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: This is the conservative aspect of communitarianism which many people (notably liberals) find uncongenial. This conservatism is implicit in Aristotle's account of virtue. I have become more conservative to accommodate it. |
| 18649 | If everyone owned himself, that would prevent slavery [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: The best way to prevent enslavement of one person to another is to give each person ownership over himself. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 4.2.c) | |
| A reaction: [The idea comes from Nozick, but Kymlicka is assessing how it should be understood] The best way to block any social evil like slavery is to make it unthinkable. Legislation is second best. Presumably I could sell myself into slavery (like Faust)? |
| 18640 | Libertarians like the free market, but they also think that the free market is just [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Not everyone who favours the free market is a libertarian, for they do not all share the libertarian view that the free market is inherently just. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 4.1.a) | |
| A reaction: Illuminating. It would appear that exploitation is possible within a strictly free market, so it seems unlikely that free markets are inherently just (unless you don't acknowledge that 'exploitation' is wrong). |
| 18651 | The most valuable liberties to us need not be the ones with the most freedom [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Different liberties promote different interests for many different reasons, and there is no reason to assume that the liberties which are most valuable to us are the ones with the most freedom. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 2.4.a.iii) | |
| A reaction: As I grow older I come more and more to think that freedom is overvalued. But have you tried the other thing? We complacently take huge freedoms for granted. Be passionate about fundamental freedoms, and relaxed about the rest. |
| 18661 | Ancient freedom was free participation in politics, not private independence of life [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: The liberty of the ancients was their active participation in the exercise of political power, not the peaceful enjoyment of personal independence. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 7.2.a) | |
| A reaction: Interesting. It takes a feat of imagination to grasp a world where the desire for freedom to sit at home and compile a database of philosophical ideas never even crossed anyone's mind. |
| 18633 | Equal opportunities seems fair, because your fate is from your choices, not your circumstances [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: The ideology of equal opportunity seems fair to many people in our society because it ensures that people's fate is determined by their choices, rather than their circumstances. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: Is it that we surmise that people have 'free will', and then engineer a situation where it can be exercised? Is it that the rest of us don't want to feel guilty when someone else's life goes awry (because it was 'their fault')? |
| 18634 | Equal opportunity arbitrarily worries about social circumstances, but ignores talents [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: The prevailing view [of equal opportunity] only recognises differences in social circumstances, while ignoring differences in natural talents (or treating them as if they were a choice). This is an arbitrary limit on the theory's central intuition. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: Of course we (society) can do a lot about your social circumstances, but very little about your talents, other than to develop them or thwart them. Talented children need more than mere 'opportunity'. |
| 18654 | Marxists say justice is unneeded in the truly good community [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Marxists believe that justice, far from being the first virtue of social institutions, is something that the truly good community has no need for. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems to imply that in the truly good community there are nothing but truly good individuals, which is taking social determinism to its limits. Are all the citizens of a bad community inherently bad? |
| 18652 | The Lockean view of freedom depends on whether you had a right to what is restricted [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: The Lockean camp defines freedom in terms of the exercise of our rights. Whether or not a restriction decreases our freedom depends on whether or not we had a right to do the restricted thing. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 2.4.a.iii) | |
| A reaction: My first instinct is to be sympathetic to this, since a detached and general notion of 'freedom' strikes me as suspect. He offers the rival 'Spenserian' view of freedom as just having the choice. |
| 18655 | Justice corrects social faults, but also expresses respect to individuals as ends [Kymlicka] |
| Full Idea: Justice is more than a remedial virtue. It does remedy defects in social co-ordination, ...but it also expresses the respect individuals are owed as ends in themselves, not as mean's to someone's good, or even to the common good. | |
| From: Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy (1st edn) [1990], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: That is, I take it, that justice operates at two different levels in our theoretical social thinking. |
| 6865 | A-theory says past, present, future and flow exist; B-theory says this just reports our perspective [Le Poidevin] |
| Full Idea: The A-theory regards our intuitive distinction of time into past, present and future as objective, and takes seriously the idea that time flows; the B-theory says this just reflects our perspective, like the spatial distinction between here and there. | |
| From: Robin Le Poidevin (Interview with Baggini and Stangroom [2001], p.174) | |
| A reaction: The distinction comes from McTaggart. Physics seems to be built on an objective view of time, and yet Einstein makes time relative. What possible evidence could decide between the two theories? |