A Book on the Philosophy of Time I

Last summer, Valdi Ingthorsson, of Lund University in Sweden, released a book on the philosophy of time, with the title McTaggart's Paradox.

https://rdingthorsson.wordpress.com/summary-of-mctaggarts-paradox/

I will provide some background material on the subject he is discussing, in Part I of this two-part discussion. In the second,which I hope to have ready by this coming Thursday, I'll speak to what Ingthorsson brings to this table.

But let's start, as Ingthorsson does, with John M. E. McTaggart, a philosopher who flourished a century ago and who in 1908 published a landmark essay on the subject of time.

http://www.ditext.com/mctaggart/time.html

"McTaggart's paradox" is a key argument of his for the unreality of time. If I understand it the gist is this: in order for time to be real, the past and future have to exist in parity with each other (and with the present). Yet that can only be the case if time is not real, that is, if events of the past, of the present, and of the future, stand in timeless relations to one another. The postulation of the reality of time, then, undermines itself, leading to the necessity of timelessness. That's my characterization of his argument -- I bear sole responsibility for it. If it is cock-eyed, both McTaggart and Ingthorsson are blameless.

Another point: McTaggart saw this argument not as a stand-alone conjuring of a startling inference, but as part of his broader idealistic philosophy. He was a Hegelian, though one of a unique sort. He thought many of the specifics in Hegel's work (and in the work of other revisionists in that tradition for that matter) were badly flawed, but he thought the dialectical method of reasoning was a sound one, and could lead us to an understanding of ultimate reality. When he applied that method himself, Ultimate Reality turned out to be: a lot of distinct and mutually interdependent minds, among themselves imagining a world into existence.

Many people find it an oddity that McTaggart was both an atheist and a believer in human immortality. He thus severed two beliefs that, in western circles at any rate, are generally accepted or rejected as a package. From his point of view, of course, there is no oddity -- this network of interdependent immortal minds of which you and I are each a part is Absolute enough: we need postulate nothing higher!

I won't attempt to discuss Hegelianism here, its British 19th century variant, or McTaggart's early 20th century variant of that. I bring it all up here only to say that McTaggart himself didn't think his critique of the idea of time was a stand-alone matter. It was part of his Big Picture. Still, as it has echoed down through history it has become: a stand-alone matter.

That's enough for now. Within days (assuming time is real), I'll write something about what Ingthorsson has to say about (a) McTaggart, and (b) the philosophy of time.

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...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

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...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog