" Time as a whole and in its parts bears to Space as a whole and its corresponding parts a relation analogous to the relation of mind to its equivalent bodily or nervous basis; or to put the matter shortly that Time is the mind of Space and Space the body of Time....[We] are examples of a pattern which is universal and is followed not only by things but by Space-Time itself." Let this be your random quote for the day, from ... Samuel Alexander, SPACE, TIME AND DEITY (1927). Like other great books, that one began as a set of Gifford Lectures ... specifically as Glasgow Gifford lectures. The Gifford lectures were established in 1887 by the will of Adam Gifford, Lord Gifford. The will requires that they "promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term." They are given are four ancient Scottish universities: St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh. To be asked to give a Gifford lecture has become in the fullness of time a signa...
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I mentioned Samuel Alexander last week in the course of discussing the semantics of emergence. At one time, I considered Alexander to be an important and impressive philosopher. I'm afraid I've outgrown his appeal, but he is certainly worth a blog entry of his own. He is the author of Space, Time, and Deity (1920). If you are interested in the social history of academe, you might also want to know that he was the first Jewish fellow of an Oxbridge college. The book named above is one of the early expressions of metaphysicians' efforts to incorporate Einsteinian physics into their own speculations. Space and Time are named separately in the title, but the book is suffused with the idea that they are one, and that this one thing, spacetime, is not merely (as many philosophers have thought and still think) a matter of relationships among objects or events, it is a directly intuited substance. What is more, spacetime is THE substance for Alexander. Over t...
In contemporary metaphysical discussions the word "emergence" and its variants play a big part. It often appears in the context of the mind-body problem. The mind (or intentionality, or consciousness, or whatever you may call the intangible subjective aspect of our reality) is said to have "emerged" at a certain moment in evolution, and to recapitulate this by "emerging" again at a certain moment in embryology. I think there is an element of word magic involved. We lessen the mystery of something by having a good word for it. IIRC, Samuel Alexander built an impressive metaphysical structure around this word magic. Matter, he said, emerged from space, then life from matter, then mind from life, like a growing ziggurat. I bring this up because I came across an intriguing discussion of the ambiguity of the word in my recent web surfing. Here is a link. It turns out that was written a year ago but, hey, that's an eyeblink for the chronology of ...