The following is the handout we received for our first class in this course.
Handout for the first class
York University, Glendon College, Department of Philosophy
GL/PHIL 3450 - The Philosophy of Time
Winter 2012 Term
Professor Tony Kostroman
Intuition Checks
Before we have read anything, what are some of our basic intuitions?
A Qualifying Note: As with almost everything philosophical, this title needs some explaining and defence. There are philosophers who argue that "intuition" is a badly used and abused term. That is, today's "intuitions" are just yesterday's revolutionary philosophical and theoretical ideas. What I am really trying to access here, according to this view, is our pre-philosohical and pre-theoretical understanding we possess. But, so the story goes, as phenomenologists would argue, trying to access the pre-philosohical understanding we possess is hard labour. We have layers of theoretical sedimentation handed down to us thorough the centuries, of how we think about any topic. Peeling them off to access our basic pre-theoretical understanding requires a certain training and work that we cannot do with these introductory questions. Some philosophers would argue that such a pre-philosohical understanding doesn't exist. After noting, but not engaging this debate, I will continue to refer to these questions as "intuition checks."
Intuition Check Number One:
Theme: Thinking about the Future
Question: Do statements concerning the future have a truth value?
For example, consider the statement: In five years I will be married? Does this statement possess now a truth value?
YES: Of course, all statements possess a truth value. This is a time honoured philosophical doctrine known as bi-valence. I may not know if I will be married in five years but it is either true or false that I will be. If I am married in five years, and this statement is thus true, it is true now even though I do not know it. Either I will be married in five years or I will not. What can be more obvious. And such an "or" statement is defined truth-functionally; that is, it is defined through the truth values of its component parts. That is how we understand and make logical sense of such statements. But that means that the component parts have truth values.
NO: The future doesn't exist. How can there be a true statement concerning what doesn't exist; other, than is, then to state what it doesn't exist. For example, consider the paradigmatic true statement:
(T) "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white.
This statement is true because it corresponds to the fact that snow is white. Or if corresponds and facts irrate our philosophical understanding of truth, we can simply say that such a statement is true when what it states, is as it states. This "is" states that what is being talked about exists. Since the future doesn't exist, it cannot have a truth value now. Such statements are indeterminate and thus we have three truth values: true, false, indeterminate. "Either I will be married or I will not be" can be considered true since this is a just a logical truth - "p v ~p" - and as a logical truth it is timeless: it is true in all possible worlds and in all future streams. But it doesn't follow that each of the component parts have a truth value now.
Intuition Check Number Two:
Theme: Thinking about the Future
Suppose we grant that future statements possess a truth value.
Question: Does this mean that we do not have freedom of the will?
YES: Suppose it is true now that I will be married in five years. ALL events leading up this marriage also possess a truth value. But what this means is that there is nothing I can do to change this truth value. If it is really true now that I will be married in five years then I will be married in five years and there is nothing I can do to change it. If I did change this then it would not be true now that I will be married in five years. This is also the case for the truth values of ALL the events leading up to and beyond the marriage. This "nothing I can do" means that I do not have freedom of the will. The future will unfold the single way it does.
NO: All that future statements possessing a truth value means is that it is in principle possible to have foreknowledge concerning the future, though not for us mortal beings. How can simply knowing what is going to happen in the future contribute to the freewill/determinism debate? If one knows that acts a person will freely choose, this does not at all suggest that such acts were not freely chosen. If freedom of the will is correct this is indeed a very special type of knowledge. It does not, for obvious reasons, involve deducing the choice from causal antecedents. And it is an interesting debate to suggest that kind of knowledge this could be. However, this manner of framing the dispute assumes that such foreknowledge occurs in time. For example, it is often argued in a theological context that God's foreknowledge makes freewill illusory. However, if God stands outside of and apart from time, then God knows what happens in a non-temporal way. God knows what I have, am, and will do but not before I do it and thus there is no conflict with freewill. Whatever our stand is on that debate, it is divorced from the idea that future statements possess a truth value.
Intuition Check Number Three:
Theme: Thinking about the Past
Background Story:
In a particular culture and family tradition children shower with one or both parents up until the age of nine. At nine years old, they shower by themselves. A young woman is attending university. Before attending, she would have described her childhood as relatively happy and normal. She gave no thought to this showering custom: it was "normal." Attending a lecture, the professor in teaching on this custom argues and refers to it as a form of sexual abuse. Enamoured with the authority of the professor (unwise), she is greatly traumatized. She considers herself to be a victim of sexual abuse. Her childhood is no longer relatively happy but rather painful, a history of sexual abuse.
Question: Has her past changed?
YES: The day before she attended that lecture her past was happy, now it is painful. That is a change. The past doesn't exist except for our historical documents, artifacts and/or memories. All of that is subject to interpretation. Dated events don't change in the past; however, how we make sense of, describe, and understand the past has little to do with such dated events. The past is indeterminate, fluctuating with the development of new concepts and descriptions. Think of two hundred years ago - 1802 - when it was rare, but not unheard of, for a man in his forties to marry a fourteen year old girl - today we call it ***** and the man we call a child molester: that was not the "past" for them. It has changed.
NO: The past is the past and it doesn't change. What happened cannot be undone and this speaks to the past's immutability. Our interpretations of the past may change and how we understand the past may change but that doesn't mean that the past has changed. The past is fully determinate. If we understand that man to be a child molester, then that is what he was then and now. And if this showering custom was a form of sexual abuse, then her childhood was marked by abuse then and now - it has not changed.
Intuition Check Number Four:
Basic Theme: Thinking about the past.
Question: Why are there professional historians? And what does it mean to say that they are doing cutting edge, new historical research?
One Answer:
Some background:
One sometimes wonder why we cannot write a history book once and for all a certain time period. For example, from 1650-1750, say around 1780 to give time to collect all the documents, someone simply writes what happened and we are done with it. Gadamer gives one answer:
Subsequent events are productive for understanding historical meaning. For example, we have certain insights into 19th century Marxism and Communism with the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 20th century, insights that those in the 19th century could not have possessed. If we grant that subsequent events had to happen in order to access certain aspects of historical meaning, then we have some radical consequences for a theory of meaning. Where do we locate such historical meaning? It is not the original audience, the original intentions of the protagonists, since they have not undergone such subsequent events. And yet the historian is not simply writing fiction: "it is equally indubitable that it remains the same work whose fullness of meaning is realized in the changing process of understanding, just as it is the same history whose meaning is constantly in the process of being defined." (T & M, p.373). Any appeal to the rational reconstruction of the historian must also appeal to the normativity of historical meaning. We here the saying "time will tell." Gadamer takes this saying seriously. There is even a fancy name for it: distanciation. What we have is a fusion of horizons where our particular historical situation, our horizon, can be both enriched and able to understand certain insights of a previous historical epoch. Thus, the meaning of a certain even is not trapped or restricted to the original actors, its original occurrence.
Do you believe that from our vantage point we are able to "see" certain truths and insights of a particular time period that may have been unknown to the actors of that time period and yet it is true of that time period? The Chinese are going to write a history of the Roman Empire that differs from our own. The reason is that from their particular cultural heritage, they are going to "see" certain aspects of that time period we may be blinded to - and vice-versa. But the important point, needed to maintain that such historians are not writing fiction, is that they are going to "see" certain aspects of that time period, even if such aspects are unbeknownst to the participants of that time period.
Or to take another example, consider the marriage example from the "intuition check." It may have been unbeknownst to all the participants involved in this that this is ***** and a form of abuse. As so unbeknownst, it may well be unfair to call the man a child molester. But we can "see" that nevertheless, that is what is was: an insight, meaning, true of their era but not entertained in their era. The past is thus not indeterminate on this conception, it requires an "unfolding" in time.
That is one answer - the Gadamerian - for why there will always be a need for historians.
If you do accept this, what metaphysics of meaning does it commit you to? Meaning appears no longer to be "in the head" of individual actors but rather, exceeds their intentions. We have a non-individualistic, non-instrumentalist, notion of language and tradition.
If you cannot accept this, how would you answer the question: Why are there professional historians? And what does it mean to say that they are doing cutting edge, new historical research?
Intuition Check Number Five:
Theme: The significance of time.
We ask "What is time?" Maybe we should ask as well "What of it?" Why is time so fascinating? What do we hope to find in thinking about and studying time? Why does it matter?
Lets be a little more specific. In what respect does time matter to us when it comes to thinking about our personal identity.
In this class we are going to look at two very different approaches in answering this question.
Approach One: the "existentialist" approach. The basis for both understanding of time and of its significance to us, arises from our confrontation with our mortality. We are being-unto-death. How it is that we face our mortality - resolutely, fleeing from it, indifference etc. - determines who we are and ultimately how it is that we are going to live our lives. In this respect, temporality is the key to an understanding of our identity for it is our grasp of temporality in our finitude that is formative in our outlook on living and in who we are.
We are going to be looking at Heidegger's thoughts on this matter and his general theory of temporality.
Approach Two: the debate between perdurantism and endurantism. What's that?
Perdurantism: just as I am considered to have spatial parts, arms and legs for example, I also have temporal parts: TK at 2000, 2001, 2002, etc. I am a four-dimensional whole consisting of three spatial dimensions and a temporal dimension, spanning from birth to death. TK at 2012 is a part of this whole and the aggregate of all temporal parts is what I am composed of. Since I am the four-demensional whole spanning from my birth to death, it cannot be said that I undergo any actual change. My temporal parts my be different with different properties; however, none of these temporal parts considered in themselves can be said to be who I am. I am the sum total of all such parts. What also follows from this is that I am never wholly present at any time. In fact, such a "wholly present" like the "present" itself considered as a unique now point, or the "moving now" conception of time, is considered to be illusory. As we shall see in this class, such a view is motivated by a particular understanding of time.
Endurantism: I am a three dimensional being, wholly present at each time in my life who thus endures through time. I can and do change. There are no such temporal parts. What exists is what presently exists - a doctrine known as presentism - and thus there is no ontological reality for such temporal parts to possess. I once was twenty years old but not now and who I am is who I am now. Though fraught with philosophical difficulties, there is a sense in which I can say that I am the same person I was ten years ago, something you cannot say according to the perdurantist view: we are simply a collection of different temporal parts, none of these parts are identical and it is only the whole that has a personal identity.
Question: What is it that fascinates you about time?
Intuition Check Number Six:
Theme: The cosmological "verses" the phenomenological conception of time.
By the "phenomenological conception of time" all that is meant is our lived experience. Phenomenologists claim that there is a different between how we represent time, how we objectify time, and how it is that we experience time. We represent time through our watches, clocks, calendars, etc. Such a representation conceives of time as a series of now points similar to points along a ruler. According to such a conception the past no longer exists and the future is not yet; thus, it doesn't exist as well. Only the present exists. Many phenomenologists claim that this not our experience of time. The past is very real. It has formed us and we carry it along with us in every person we meet and new situation we face. Often we have to undue and struggle against our past - give your parents a giant hug if you have been raised in a loving home. The future is also very real.
In fact, according to one theory, that is most "unreal" is the present. For example, consider all of us sitting here in this class. We are all here now because we have interpreted our past in a certain respect that has given rise to our seizing hold of a future possibility for ourselves. This future possibility for you involves the obtaining of a university degree; hence that and certain interests you possess, is why you are now sitting in this class. We are always directed towards the future. For those who believe they no longer have a future for themselves, hopelessness, despair and nihilism sets in. We are always ahead of ourselves striving towards the future. And we have a reciprocal relationship between the past and the future. Our past is interpreted in a certain respect which causes us to project a future possibility for ourselves but it is also the case that our understanding of the future, what possibility for we believe it to contain, forms how it is that we understand the past and our past. And as these possibilities come to fruition or are frustrated, our understanding of our past alters: I thought I was, and going to be, a ... but such was not the case. All of this constitutes and forms the present itself. Thus, the past and future takes priority in our experience of time unlike our representations of time where they are said not to exist giving the present a priority. But in losing the present in such a fashion, caught as it is in the dynamic of past and future, have we lost something important for the human being; namely, our sense of and move towards the eternal now (Augustine)? And is this "experience of time" purely psychological?
Along this theme, let us narrow our questioning. Consider the following quotes. The first quote comes from Albert Einstein written as a consoling note to the Besso family, after the death of his close friend Michele Besso and shortly before his own death.
"Now he had departed his strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
And the second quote comes from... can anyone tell me?
"Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say"
Both of these quotes involve radically different conceptions of time. The view of time Einstein subscribed to goes by many names: the block universe theory of time, the static conception of time, the tenseless view of time. Many philosopher refer to it as eternalism since according to them, such a conception actually denies the existence of time, placing all events, from the theoretical vantage point of the physicist, in the eternal now.
According to this conception of time your fifteen year old self and your seventy year old self are all equally "real" and actual. Thus, as Michael Lockwood puts it "From this perspective, a person who is not living now, but did or will live at other times, exists in just as substantial a sense as someone who does not live here, but only at some other place... Regarded in this light, death is not the deletion of a person's existence. It is an event, merely, that marks the outer limit of that person's extension in one (timelike) spatio-temporal direction, just as the person's skin marks out the limit in other (spacelike) directions... Einstein is urging us to regard those living times past, like those living in foreign parts, as equally out there in space-time, enjoying the same flesh-and-blood existence as ourselves. It is simply that they and we inhabit different regions of the continuum." Just as when I look out on the night sky and see the stars present with myself now but as they were thousands of years ago from a different observational standpoint, a similarly placed observer in the galaxy will have a first century person present now. It is all there in space-time.
So we all already possess eternal life! Right? But what is missing from this account, a mission component that we find very important in thinking about our own deaths and of the deaths of loved ones? The conscious awareness of a now and consciousness in general for that matter. This bothered Einstein. Carnap writes of a conversation he had with Einstein in the 1950s:
Furthermore, according to this conception, time does not pass or flow. If time is a river, then, as physicist Brian Greene tells us, it is a frozen river.
The second quote embodies our familiar experience of time. Time does indeed flow. We sense ourselves getting older sometimes even despairingly so. My fifteen year old self once was but is no longer and my seventy year old self, doesn't yet exist.
Intuition Check One Question: What are we to make of these radically different conceptions of time? Without any study of the matter which of the options, on a guttural level, do you gravitate towards?
Option One: If this is the viewpoint that most physicist have adopted and is the standard interpretation of relativity theory, then we need to "get over it" if it does not conform to our experiences or "intuitions." That is what science teaches and we should learn and study it.
Option Two: Reassert our common conception and experiences of time. Strictly speaking, what Einstein showed is that if absolute time exists then it is in principle empirically undetectable. Now what is in principle empirically undetectable is of no value to the working scientist. However, unless we are prone to a philosophical verificationism, that may well not be enough to abandon the notion. We can take what physicist call, especially with respect to quantum mechanics, the "shut up and calculate" approach here. We can view this conception of time as merely representing the limitations of our measuring instruments and furthermore, adopt an instrumentalism with respect to such theories. We may even be tempted to go so far as the noted philosopher Max Black does when he states that physicists should call that they are studying something other than time - if time is just values in equations according to geometrical mathematical modelling, then it is not time that we are talking about anymore. Also, if there exists an alternative interpretation of relativity theory that postulates and accords with our common conceptions, is empirically adequate and supported by a number of physicists - there is - then even if it "fails" on other scientific desiderata such as elegance and simplicity, that is what we should adopt. But then are we taking our common conception of time "on faith"?
Option Three: Declare both conceptions somehow correct that represents a paradox requiring a future resolution.
Which do you gravitate towards?
Note: This is not a "philosophy of science" class with respect to time. We will have occasion to mention some of the debates but they will be presented for your information only and not required for this course: there are lots of other interesting philosophical issues concerning time.
GL/PHIL 3450 - The Philosophy of Time
Winter 2012 Term
Professor Tony Kostroman
Intuition Checks
Before we have read anything, what are some of our basic intuitions?
A Qualifying Note: As with almost everything philosophical, this title needs some explaining and defence. There are philosophers who argue that "intuition" is a badly used and abused term. That is, today's "intuitions" are just yesterday's revolutionary philosophical and theoretical ideas. What I am really trying to access here, according to this view, is our pre-philosohical and pre-theoretical understanding we possess. But, so the story goes, as phenomenologists would argue, trying to access the pre-philosohical understanding we possess is hard labour. We have layers of theoretical sedimentation handed down to us thorough the centuries, of how we think about any topic. Peeling them off to access our basic pre-theoretical understanding requires a certain training and work that we cannot do with these introductory questions. Some philosophers would argue that such a pre-philosohical understanding doesn't exist. After noting, but not engaging this debate, I will continue to refer to these questions as "intuition checks."
Intuition Check Number One:
Theme: Thinking about the Future
Question: Do statements concerning the future have a truth value?
For example, consider the statement: In five years I will be married? Does this statement possess now a truth value?
YES: Of course, all statements possess a truth value. This is a time honoured philosophical doctrine known as bi-valence. I may not know if I will be married in five years but it is either true or false that I will be. If I am married in five years, and this statement is thus true, it is true now even though I do not know it. Either I will be married in five years or I will not. What can be more obvious. And such an "or" statement is defined truth-functionally; that is, it is defined through the truth values of its component parts. That is how we understand and make logical sense of such statements. But that means that the component parts have truth values.
NO: The future doesn't exist. How can there be a true statement concerning what doesn't exist; other, than is, then to state what it doesn't exist. For example, consider the paradigmatic true statement:
(T) "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white.
This statement is true because it corresponds to the fact that snow is white. Or if corresponds and facts irrate our philosophical understanding of truth, we can simply say that such a statement is true when what it states, is as it states. This "is" states that what is being talked about exists. Since the future doesn't exist, it cannot have a truth value now. Such statements are indeterminate and thus we have three truth values: true, false, indeterminate. "Either I will be married or I will not be" can be considered true since this is a just a logical truth - "p v ~p" - and as a logical truth it is timeless: it is true in all possible worlds and in all future streams. But it doesn't follow that each of the component parts have a truth value now.
Intuition Check Number Two:
Theme: Thinking about the Future
Suppose we grant that future statements possess a truth value.
Question: Does this mean that we do not have freedom of the will?
YES: Suppose it is true now that I will be married in five years. ALL events leading up this marriage also possess a truth value. But what this means is that there is nothing I can do to change this truth value. If it is really true now that I will be married in five years then I will be married in five years and there is nothing I can do to change it. If I did change this then it would not be true now that I will be married in five years. This is also the case for the truth values of ALL the events leading up to and beyond the marriage. This "nothing I can do" means that I do not have freedom of the will. The future will unfold the single way it does.
NO: All that future statements possessing a truth value means is that it is in principle possible to have foreknowledge concerning the future, though not for us mortal beings. How can simply knowing what is going to happen in the future contribute to the freewill/determinism debate? If one knows that acts a person will freely choose, this does not at all suggest that such acts were not freely chosen. If freedom of the will is correct this is indeed a very special type of knowledge. It does not, for obvious reasons, involve deducing the choice from causal antecedents. And it is an interesting debate to suggest that kind of knowledge this could be. However, this manner of framing the dispute assumes that such foreknowledge occurs in time. For example, it is often argued in a theological context that God's foreknowledge makes freewill illusory. However, if God stands outside of and apart from time, then God knows what happens in a non-temporal way. God knows what I have, am, and will do but not before I do it and thus there is no conflict with freewill. Whatever our stand is on that debate, it is divorced from the idea that future statements possess a truth value.
Intuition Check Number Three:
Theme: Thinking about the Past
Background Story:
In a particular culture and family tradition children shower with one or both parents up until the age of nine. At nine years old, they shower by themselves. A young woman is attending university. Before attending, she would have described her childhood as relatively happy and normal. She gave no thought to this showering custom: it was "normal." Attending a lecture, the professor in teaching on this custom argues and refers to it as a form of sexual abuse. Enamoured with the authority of the professor (unwise), she is greatly traumatized. She considers herself to be a victim of sexual abuse. Her childhood is no longer relatively happy but rather painful, a history of sexual abuse.
Question: Has her past changed?
YES: The day before she attended that lecture her past was happy, now it is painful. That is a change. The past doesn't exist except for our historical documents, artifacts and/or memories. All of that is subject to interpretation. Dated events don't change in the past; however, how we make sense of, describe, and understand the past has little to do with such dated events. The past is indeterminate, fluctuating with the development of new concepts and descriptions. Think of two hundred years ago - 1802 - when it was rare, but not unheard of, for a man in his forties to marry a fourteen year old girl - today we call it ***** and the man we call a child molester: that was not the "past" for them. It has changed.
NO: The past is the past and it doesn't change. What happened cannot be undone and this speaks to the past's immutability. Our interpretations of the past may change and how we understand the past may change but that doesn't mean that the past has changed. The past is fully determinate. If we understand that man to be a child molester, then that is what he was then and now. And if this showering custom was a form of sexual abuse, then her childhood was marked by abuse then and now - it has not changed.
Intuition Check Number Four:
Basic Theme: Thinking about the past.
Question: Why are there professional historians? And what does it mean to say that they are doing cutting edge, new historical research?
One Answer:
Some background:
One sometimes wonder why we cannot write a history book once and for all a certain time period. For example, from 1650-1750, say around 1780 to give time to collect all the documents, someone simply writes what happened and we are done with it. Gadamer gives one answer:
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Historical traditional can be understood only as something always in the process of being defined by the course of events. Similarly, the philologist dealing with poetic or philosophical texts knows that they are inexhaustible. In both cases it is the course of events that brings out new aspects of meaning in historical material.
(Truth and Method, 373)
(Truth and Method, 373)
Subsequent events are productive for understanding historical meaning. For example, we have certain insights into 19th century Marxism and Communism with the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 20th century, insights that those in the 19th century could not have possessed. If we grant that subsequent events had to happen in order to access certain aspects of historical meaning, then we have some radical consequences for a theory of meaning. Where do we locate such historical meaning? It is not the original audience, the original intentions of the protagonists, since they have not undergone such subsequent events. And yet the historian is not simply writing fiction: "it is equally indubitable that it remains the same work whose fullness of meaning is realized in the changing process of understanding, just as it is the same history whose meaning is constantly in the process of being defined." (T & M, p.373). Any appeal to the rational reconstruction of the historian must also appeal to the normativity of historical meaning. We here the saying "time will tell." Gadamer takes this saying seriously. There is even a fancy name for it: distanciation. What we have is a fusion of horizons where our particular historical situation, our horizon, can be both enriched and able to understand certain insights of a previous historical epoch. Thus, the meaning of a certain even is not trapped or restricted to the original actors, its original occurrence.
Do you believe that from our vantage point we are able to "see" certain truths and insights of a particular time period that may have been unknown to the actors of that time period and yet it is true of that time period? The Chinese are going to write a history of the Roman Empire that differs from our own. The reason is that from their particular cultural heritage, they are going to "see" certain aspects of that time period we may be blinded to - and vice-versa. But the important point, needed to maintain that such historians are not writing fiction, is that they are going to "see" certain aspects of that time period, even if such aspects are unbeknownst to the participants of that time period.
Or to take another example, consider the marriage example from the "intuition check." It may have been unbeknownst to all the participants involved in this that this is ***** and a form of abuse. As so unbeknownst, it may well be unfair to call the man a child molester. But we can "see" that nevertheless, that is what is was: an insight, meaning, true of their era but not entertained in their era. The past is thus not indeterminate on this conception, it requires an "unfolding" in time.
That is one answer - the Gadamerian - for why there will always be a need for historians.
If you do accept this, what metaphysics of meaning does it commit you to? Meaning appears no longer to be "in the head" of individual actors but rather, exceeds their intentions. We have a non-individualistic, non-instrumentalist, notion of language and tradition.
If you cannot accept this, how would you answer the question: Why are there professional historians? And what does it mean to say that they are doing cutting edge, new historical research?
Intuition Check Number Five:
Theme: The significance of time.
We ask "What is time?" Maybe we should ask as well "What of it?" Why is time so fascinating? What do we hope to find in thinking about and studying time? Why does it matter?
Lets be a little more specific. In what respect does time matter to us when it comes to thinking about our personal identity.
In this class we are going to look at two very different approaches in answering this question.
Approach One: the "existentialist" approach. The basis for both understanding of time and of its significance to us, arises from our confrontation with our mortality. We are being-unto-death. How it is that we face our mortality - resolutely, fleeing from it, indifference etc. - determines who we are and ultimately how it is that we are going to live our lives. In this respect, temporality is the key to an understanding of our identity for it is our grasp of temporality in our finitude that is formative in our outlook on living and in who we are.
We are going to be looking at Heidegger's thoughts on this matter and his general theory of temporality.
Approach Two: the debate between perdurantism and endurantism. What's that?
Perdurantism: just as I am considered to have spatial parts, arms and legs for example, I also have temporal parts: TK at 2000, 2001, 2002, etc. I am a four-dimensional whole consisting of three spatial dimensions and a temporal dimension, spanning from birth to death. TK at 2012 is a part of this whole and the aggregate of all temporal parts is what I am composed of. Since I am the four-demensional whole spanning from my birth to death, it cannot be said that I undergo any actual change. My temporal parts my be different with different properties; however, none of these temporal parts considered in themselves can be said to be who I am. I am the sum total of all such parts. What also follows from this is that I am never wholly present at any time. In fact, such a "wholly present" like the "present" itself considered as a unique now point, or the "moving now" conception of time, is considered to be illusory. As we shall see in this class, such a view is motivated by a particular understanding of time.
Endurantism: I am a three dimensional being, wholly present at each time in my life who thus endures through time. I can and do change. There are no such temporal parts. What exists is what presently exists - a doctrine known as presentism - and thus there is no ontological reality for such temporal parts to possess. I once was twenty years old but not now and who I am is who I am now. Though fraught with philosophical difficulties, there is a sense in which I can say that I am the same person I was ten years ago, something you cannot say according to the perdurantist view: we are simply a collection of different temporal parts, none of these parts are identical and it is only the whole that has a personal identity.
Question: What is it that fascinates you about time?
Intuition Check Number Six:
Theme: The cosmological "verses" the phenomenological conception of time.
By the "phenomenological conception of time" all that is meant is our lived experience. Phenomenologists claim that there is a different between how we represent time, how we objectify time, and how it is that we experience time. We represent time through our watches, clocks, calendars, etc. Such a representation conceives of time as a series of now points similar to points along a ruler. According to such a conception the past no longer exists and the future is not yet; thus, it doesn't exist as well. Only the present exists. Many phenomenologists claim that this not our experience of time. The past is very real. It has formed us and we carry it along with us in every person we meet and new situation we face. Often we have to undue and struggle against our past - give your parents a giant hug if you have been raised in a loving home. The future is also very real.
In fact, according to one theory, that is most "unreal" is the present. For example, consider all of us sitting here in this class. We are all here now because we have interpreted our past in a certain respect that has given rise to our seizing hold of a future possibility for ourselves. This future possibility for you involves the obtaining of a university degree; hence that and certain interests you possess, is why you are now sitting in this class. We are always directed towards the future. For those who believe they no longer have a future for themselves, hopelessness, despair and nihilism sets in. We are always ahead of ourselves striving towards the future. And we have a reciprocal relationship between the past and the future. Our past is interpreted in a certain respect which causes us to project a future possibility for ourselves but it is also the case that our understanding of the future, what possibility for we believe it to contain, forms how it is that we understand the past and our past. And as these possibilities come to fruition or are frustrated, our understanding of our past alters: I thought I was, and going to be, a ... but such was not the case. All of this constitutes and forms the present itself. Thus, the past and future takes priority in our experience of time unlike our representations of time where they are said not to exist giving the present a priority. But in losing the present in such a fashion, caught as it is in the dynamic of past and future, have we lost something important for the human being; namely, our sense of and move towards the eternal now (Augustine)? And is this "experience of time" purely psychological?
Along this theme, let us narrow our questioning. Consider the following quotes. The first quote comes from Albert Einstein written as a consoling note to the Besso family, after the death of his close friend Michele Besso and shortly before his own death.
"Now he had departed his strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
And the second quote comes from... can anyone tell me?
"Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say"
The_Wizard
For the ones that do not know, the second quote is taken in part from the lyrics to Time by Pink Floyd, which can be found on their 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon.
Both of these quotes involve radically different conceptions of time. The view of time Einstein subscribed to goes by many names: the block universe theory of time, the static conception of time, the tenseless view of time. Many philosopher refer to it as eternalism since according to them, such a conception actually denies the existence of time, placing all events, from the theoretical vantage point of the physicist, in the eternal now.
According to this conception of time your fifteen year old self and your seventy year old self are all equally "real" and actual. Thus, as Michael Lockwood puts it "From this perspective, a person who is not living now, but did or will live at other times, exists in just as substantial a sense as someone who does not live here, but only at some other place... Regarded in this light, death is not the deletion of a person's existence. It is an event, merely, that marks the outer limit of that person's extension in one (timelike) spatio-temporal direction, just as the person's skin marks out the limit in other (spacelike) directions... Einstein is urging us to regard those living times past, like those living in foreign parts, as equally out there in space-time, enjoying the same flesh-and-blood existence as ourselves. It is simply that they and we inhabit different regions of the continuum." Just as when I look out on the night sky and see the stars present with myself now but as they were thousands of years ago from a different observational standpoint, a similarly placed observer in the galaxy will have a first century person present now. It is all there in space-time.
So we all already possess eternal life! Right? But what is missing from this account, a mission component that we find very important in thinking about our own deaths and of the deaths of loved ones? The conscious awareness of a now and consciousness in general for that matter. This bothered Einstein. Carnap writes of a conversation he had with Einstein in the 1950s:
Rudolf Carnap
Once Einstein said that the problem of the Now worried him seriously. He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this importance difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter of painful but inevitable resignation.
Furthermore, according to this conception, time does not pass or flow. If time is a river, then, as physicist Brian Greene tells us, it is a frozen river.
The second quote embodies our familiar experience of time. Time does indeed flow. We sense ourselves getting older sometimes even despairingly so. My fifteen year old self once was but is no longer and my seventy year old self, doesn't yet exist.
Intuition Check One Question: What are we to make of these radically different conceptions of time? Without any study of the matter which of the options, on a guttural level, do you gravitate towards?
Option One: If this is the viewpoint that most physicist have adopted and is the standard interpretation of relativity theory, then we need to "get over it" if it does not conform to our experiences or "intuitions." That is what science teaches and we should learn and study it.
Option Two: Reassert our common conception and experiences of time. Strictly speaking, what Einstein showed is that if absolute time exists then it is in principle empirically undetectable. Now what is in principle empirically undetectable is of no value to the working scientist. However, unless we are prone to a philosophical verificationism, that may well not be enough to abandon the notion. We can take what physicist call, especially with respect to quantum mechanics, the "shut up and calculate" approach here. We can view this conception of time as merely representing the limitations of our measuring instruments and furthermore, adopt an instrumentalism with respect to such theories. We may even be tempted to go so far as the noted philosopher Max Black does when he states that physicists should call that they are studying something other than time - if time is just values in equations according to geometrical mathematical modelling, then it is not time that we are talking about anymore. Also, if there exists an alternative interpretation of relativity theory that postulates and accords with our common conceptions, is empirically adequate and supported by a number of physicists - there is - then even if it "fails" on other scientific desiderata such as elegance and simplicity, that is what we should adopt. But then are we taking our common conception of time "on faith"?
Option Three: Declare both conceptions somehow correct that represents a paradox requiring a future resolution.
Which do you gravitate towards?
Note: This is not a "philosophy of science" class with respect to time. We will have occasion to mention some of the debates but they will be presented for your information only and not required for this course: there are lots of other interesting philosophical issues concerning time.
