Could Time be Change?

Philosophy

Volumn 84, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 219-232

  Corish, Denis ^a  

^a BOWDOIN COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 70350020748     PISSN: 00318191     EISSN: 1469817X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0031819109000199     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. Sydney Shoemaker, 'Time without Change', Identity, Cause, and Mind, expanded edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 49-56
2. Originally published in Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969)
3. Michael Scott, 'Time and Change', The Philosophical Quarterly 45 (1995), 216
4. In this paper Scott also opposes the contention of Roger Teichmann in 'Time and Change', The Philosophical Quarterly 41 (1991), 158-77, that 'statements about changeless duration can be shown to be intelligible given a Wittgensteinian account of meaning'-Scott, 213
5. Even Leibniz, who, in The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, championed relative time (and space) as opposed to Newton's absolutes, seems to falter, when in effect challenged by Newton's proxy, Samuel Clarke, to show how relative time could produce the ideal mathematics of time. Leibniz falls back on the notion that time 'can only be an ideal thing'-which, if it means is an abstraction, is surely correct-but he provides an odd argument to show that ideality. Time cannot exist since it 'perishes eternally' (so that only the instant exists, which is itself, as durationless, not a part of time), and 'how can a thing exist, whereof no part does ever exist?'. Whoever considers these observations, will easily apprehend that time can only be an ideal thing'-II. G. Alexander (ed), The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (Manchester: The Manchester University Press, 1956), 72
6. Ursula Coope, Time for Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 32
7. Ursula Coope, Time for Aristotle 2005, 32, Ibid
8. A. Einstein, H.A. Lorentz, H. Weyl and H. Minkowski, The Principle of Relativity: A Collection of Original Papers on the Special and General Theory of Relativity, with notes by A. Sommerfeld, translated by W. Perrett and G. B, Jeffery (New York: Dover Publications-an unaltered republication of the 1923 translation first published by Methuen), 37-38
9. The result was in perfect agreement with Einstein's theory', Harald Fritzscb, An Equation that Changed the World, translated by Karin Heusch (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 135
10. Annas, 'Aristotle, Number, and Time', The Philosophical Quarterly 25 (April, 1975), 97-113
11. G. E. L. Owen, 'Aristotle on Time' in P. Machamer and R Turnbull (eds.), Motion and Time, Space and Matter (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1976), 3-27
12. Denis Corish, 'Aristotle's Attempted Derivation of Temporal Order from that of Movement and Space', Phronesis 21 (1976), 241-251. For an account of such series see, for example
13. Edward V. Huntington, The Continuum and Other Types of Serial Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917)
14. An example of such a simply ordered class is, according to Huntington, 'The class of all instants of time, arranged in order of priority' (16)
15. This is a summary of the rather elaborate discussion in Physics 1.7-9
16. quoted from Ursula Coope, op. cit., 6
17. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), 76
18. I have tried to give some ontological account of all this in Denis Corish, 'Time Reconsidered', Philosophy 81 (2006)