Skip to main content

A Source on the Philosophy of Time

SAS Banner


Here's a link to an article by Dean Zimmerman defending the intuitive (or "A-Theory") view of time.

 http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/zimmerman/PrivilegedPresent.pdf 

The intuitive view is that there is such a thing as the present, the "moving now," that at this present is ontologically privileged.

Privileged? Sounds like a bad thing to modern sensibilities. "Check your privilege, nowness!"

At any rate, we intuitively feel confident the now is real, whereas the past is uncertain and the future is promised to no one. Descartes' "cogito" is in the present tense. The certainty is "I think" not "I thought" or "I will think." From this epistemological privilege we infer an ontological one -- the intuition is that the now is more real, which is one reason self-help authors always urge us to "live here now." 

Zimmerman believes, roughly, that the inference is a sound one and the self-help authors have a point.

Further, Zimmerman provides an answer to some of the objections to the A-Theory that arise from Einsteinian physics. Special relativity, after all, requires us to understand that the "now" is relative to the framework of the observer. There is no evenly-flowing Newtonian time that is in principle accessible both for the earthbound and for the astronaut on a rocket accelerating on his and its way to Alpha Centauri. So: the only way to save the privileged "now" of intuition is by abandoning one of the foundational theories of contemporary science. That sounds alarming.

I am happy that Zimmerman is not alarmed, that there are such distinguished and well-informed defenders of the A view, yet I'm not sure that I grasp the ins and outs of his response, so I'll say no more about it now.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more