Granting Time Its Passage
Many philosophers who support a four-dimensionalist metaphysics of things also conceive of experience as a state of a mind having temporal extension or existing as a momentary feature of the dimension of time. This essay shows that such a strict four-dimensionalism — suggested in works by D. M. Armstrong, Mark Heller, and David Lewis — cannot be correct, since it cannot allow for the passing of time that is essential to awareness. The argument demonstrates that the positing of any temporal process at all must compromise the strict four-dimensionalist view of the temporality of experience. This is not to say that the traditional endurantist view is left wholeheartedly endorsed. As I point out, this traditional view makes several questionable claims of its own that must be carefully scrutinized. Still, the criticism of the strict four-dimensionalist ontology indicates a direction to be followed in developing a successful metaphysics of experience.
This essay presents a critique of what I call strict four-dimensionalism, a metaphysical view supported by David Armstrong, Mark Heller, and David Lewis.(1) Strict four-dimensionalism includes "things experiential" in the group of things that are temporal only insofar as they either have temporal extension or exist at some point upon the axis of time. I argue that experience cannot exist in this way. Its temporality must be of a different order. For experience must involve the passing of time,(2) and this is something that strict four-dimensionalism must exclude. This does not, however, disprove that ontology in toto. It does not venture beyond the theme of experience's temporal nature. What is at stake here is simply the securing of experience's temporality from a misleading metaphysical interpretation. The issue is simply the metaphysics of the seemingly non-thing-like entity of temporal experience.
Four-dimensionalism maintains that, strictly speaking, physical objects existing for more than an instant so exist only by being extended along the axis of time, just as common objects existing at more than one point in space exist in this way only by being extended along the three spatial axes.(3) As Lewis puts it: "Enduring things are timelike streaks" laid out across the fourth dimension, "wholes composed of temporal parts, or stages, located at various times and places" (Lewis 1976, 145). For a thing that lasts from one time to another, say from t1 to t2, it is thus not the case that the same thing once existing entirely at t1 exists later entirely at t2.
Sloane. A. A., Witney, F. (2010). LABOR RELATIONS (13th editions). Prentice Hall. Upper Saddle River, NJ
... middle of paper ... ... Everything is basically relative and is what each separate person perceives it to be, just like the answers to the infinite questions posed by The Turn of the Screw. Works Cited Burrows, Stuart.
The mind-body problem has kept philosophers busy ever since Descartes proposed it in the sixteenth century. The central question posed by the mind-body problem is the relationship between what we call the body and what we call the mind—one private, abstract, and the origin of all thoughts; the other public, concrete, and the executor of the mind’s commands. Paul Churchland, a proponent of the eliminative materialist view, believes that the solution to the mind-body problem lies in eliminating the single concept that allows this problem to perpetuate—the folk psychological concept of mental states. Churchland argues that the best theory of mind is a materialistic one, not a folk psychological one. Unlike other materialist views such as identity theory, Churchland wants to remove the idea of mental states from our ontology because mental states cannot be matched 1:1 with corresponding physical states. This is why Churchland’s view is called eliminative materialism—it is a materialistic account of the mind that eliminates the necessity for us to concern ourselves with mental events. At first this eliminative materialism appears to be a good solution to the mind-body problem because we need not concern ourselves with that problem if we adopt Churchland’s view. However, there is a basic flaw in his argument that raises the question of whether we should actually give up folk psychology. In this paper, we will first walk through the premises of Churchland’s argument, and then we will explore whether Churchland does a suitable job of justifying our adoption of eliminative materialism.
The philosophical theory of dualism holds that mind and body are two separate entities. While dualism presupposes that the two ‘substances’ may interact, it contrasts physicalism by refusing to denote correlation between body and mind as proof of identity. Comparing the two theories, dualism’s invulnerable proof of the existence of qualia manages to evade arguments from physicalism. While a common argument against qualia—non-physical properties defined in Jackson’s Knowledge Argument—targets the unsound nature of epiphenomenalism, this claim is not fatal to the theory of dualism as it contains claims of causation and fails to stand resolute to the conceivability of philosophical zombies. This essay argues that epiphenomenalism, while often designated as a weakness when present in an argument, can remain in valid arguments from qualia.
Beginning in the late 1700’s and growing rapidly even today, labor unions form the backbone for the American workforce and continue to fight for the common interests of workers around the country. As we look at the history of these unions, we see powerful individuals such as Terrence Powderly, Samuel Gompers, and Eugene Debs rise up as leaders in a newfound movement that protected the rights of the common worker and ensured better wages, more reasonable hours, and safer working conditions for those people (History). The rise of these labor unions also warranted new legislation that would protect against child labor in factories and give health benefits to workers who were either retired or injured, but everyone was not on board with the idea of foundations working to protect the interests of the common worker. Conflict with their industries lead to many strikes across the country in the coal, steel, and railroad industries, and several of these would ultimately end up leading to bloodshed. However, the existence of labor unions in the United States and their influence on their respective industries still resonates today, and many of our modern ideals that we have today carry over from what these labor unions fought for during through the Industrial Revolution.
John McTaggart in his essay “Time” presents a radical argument that claims time is unreal. While the argument is interesting and has attracted much attention for his arguments, I remain unconvinced of the argument he makes. This paper will lay out McTaggart’s argument that time in unreal, critically analyze why I believe McTaggart’s argument fails and present an alternative idea about time, utilizing aspects of McTaggart’s argument.
In this essay we will consider a much more recent approach to time that came to the fore in the twentieth century. In 1908 James McTaggart published an article in Mind entitled 'The Unreality of Time', in which, as the title implies, he argued that there is in reality no such thing as time. Now although this claim was in itself startling, probably what was even more significant than McTaggart's arguments was his way of stating them. It was in this paper that McTaggart first drew his now standard distinction between two ways of saying when things happen. In this essay we shall outline these ways of describing events and then discuss the merits and demerits of each, and examine what has become known as the 'tensed versus tenseless' debate on temporal becoming.
. Its most famous defender is Descartes, who argues that as a subject of conscious thought and experience, he cannot consist simply of spatially extended matter. His essential nature must be non-m...
The what it is like to undergo an experience is essential to understanding that experience. Known by philosophers as subjective qualia, these characteristics are part of what makes a felt experience exactly that experience. If we introspect our own mental states, this seems apparent and incontrovertible. Most philosophers are unwilling to grant that subjective qualia are non-physical states, and attempts to face this problem and maintain physicalism must address arguments from qualia. While differing physical explanations for these subjective qualia exist, I will only briefly refer to them here as qualia will serve only as a means of leading the reader to the Explanatory Gap(1). The Explanatory Gap is a uniquely puzzling problem for physicalist philosophies of mind.
Unions have an extensive history of standing up for workers. They have advocated rights of steelworkers, coal miners, clothing factory employees, teachers, health care workers, and many others. The labor movement is based on the idea that organized workers as a group have more power than individuals would have on their own. The key purpose of any union is to negotiate contracts, making sure workers are respected and fairly compensated for their work. “In theory” unions are democratic organizations, resulting in varying inner authority. Workers look for security within a job a...
In the Transcendental aesthetics, Kant defines the objective validity of Space and Time as concepts a priori with the help from of Geometry, showing that if we believe in the validity of Geometry, we have to believe that Space and Time are concepts a priori. In the Pure Concepts of Understanding, Kant claims that our intuitions are dependent on sensibility; everything we sense accumulates into our brain and our understanding of the information we sensed relies on organizing that data so that we can recognize the object. Thus, he asserts that understanding is not a faculty of intuition but sensibility. Furthermore, the act of organizing the data into one representation is defined as function and these functions serve as a bridge between the object and its concepts because concepts are not directly related to an object but just some representations of it. This, when function and concepts are put together, Kant concludes is defined as judgment, knowledge of the fact that there is ...
... in parapsychology where this provides an empirical case for non-materialism and a counter-example to physicalism.
In this paper, I will explain and argue for two-way interactive substance dualism. Dualism is a term referred to the idea that there are only two basic kinds of things and everything real is categorized under those two things. Dualism is split into two types, substance dualism, and property dualism. Substance dualism is the idea that the mind and body are two different sorts of basic substance, whereas property dualism is our mental and physical properties are two separate types of basic properties even though they may be properties of the same thing (lecture). Branching from dualism, mind-body dualism argues that the mind and body are two separate entities. Although they are two different substances, i.e. brain/body being material and
“It was a new discovery to find that these stories were, after all, about our own lives, were not distant, that there was no past or future that all time is now-time, centred in the being.” (Pp39.)
But, “human persons have an ‘inner’ dimension that is just as important as the ‘outer’ embodiment” (Cortez, 71). The “inner” element cannot be wholly explained by the “outer” embodiment, but it does give rise to inimitable facets of the human life, such as human dignity and personal identity. The mind-body problem entails two theories, dualism and physicalism. Dualism contends that distinct mental and physical realms exist, and they both must be taken into account. Its counterpart (weak) physicalism views the human as being completely bodily and physical, encompassing no non-physical, or spiritual, substances.