Last week I posted about Wilhelm Wundt, and said that he was a structuralist, as distinct from a functionalist, in psychology. What does this mean? It means that his goal was to break down consciousness into elements, and then to suggest how the elements combine, or could have combined, to create the whole structure that we know through introspection. For Wundt the structure begins with sensation. At first blush a sensation is a physical fact -- light striking an eye, for example, The physical facts are much the same for us as they are for other creatures. But we are humans, with minds. So (WW's line of thought here)... we have apperception, a process that turns sensations into something different. Apperception turns sensation into intuition. Wundt saw his laboratory's experiments were an effort at learning something about this transformation. One issue that troubled him was: how does the human mind acquire its intuition of space? These three dimensio...
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A new book by Deborah J. Brown and Calvin G. Normore offers us a view of Descartes' philosophy of the material world, the hypothetical PHYSICS within his metaphysics, that is more sympathetic than many of the other recent takes on it. Here's a link to a review by John Carriero, of UCLA. https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/descartes-and-the-ontology-of-everyday-life/ Carriero starts by discussing the Cartesian view of everyday objects. Since extension is the essence of matter, space and matter are one and the same. But for Descartes types of matter differentiate themselves by size. Some are very small, and here Descartes allows for such microscopic realities as may in the course of time be discovered, though he didn't accept atomism -- the idea that there is an absolutely bottom rung of the ladder of scale. Some objects, those of everyday life, are medium size, large globules, and these include the bodies from within which your soul and mine look out at the world. Some objects...
There are surely respects in which the notion of “space-time” as a unitary block, the view of time as just one of its dimensions, has served a useful role in the further development of science and technology. Insofar as it does, we might accept it pragmatically as true. But (secondly) broad propositions are often ambiguous, even when not obviously so, and in the case of any ambiguity it is always open to us to say that the statement or the idea is true in one respect, false in another. What might tempt us even at an early blush to suspect that there are respects in which this idea is false? There are the various ambiguities and paradoxes that come with the idea. Consider the bicycle in the doorway as an example. A bicycle stands in an open doorway such that the front of the bike is inside the house, the back of the door is outside. A philosopher asks us, “Well, is the bike in the house or not?” We might well reply, “some parts are, some parts are not.” Simp...
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...
C.D. Broad: "In a linear spatial series there is no asymmetric dyadic relation intrinsic to the series… In the temporal series of experiences, which constitutes a person's mental history there is a genuine dyadic relation which is intrinsic to the series and involves no reference to any term outside the latter. This is the relation "earlier than". It is the fundamental relation here, and temporal betweenness is definable in terms of it. In the temporal series there are two intrinsically opposite directions, earlier-to-later and later- to- earlier. In the linear spatial series there is no intrinsic direction. If direction is to be introduced, this must be done extrinsically, either by reference to motion along the line (and therefore to time)," The point, if I understand it, is that time is a very different sort of thing from space, and when physicists talk of "spacetime" as one thing they are, for their own valid purposes of course, glossing over...