Earlier and later if and only if past, present and future

Philosophy

Volumn 86, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 41-58

  Corish, Denis ^a  

^a BOWDOIN COLLEGE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 79958143980     PISSN: 00318191     EISSN: 1469817X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0031819110000598     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. See Denis Corish, 'Could Time be Change?' Philosophy 84 (2009), 219-232. I argue there that Shoemaker's attempt to show the possibility of a time without change begs the question by assuming that time passes in a region without change because it passes in a distant region with change, which distant region has, apart from observation, no effect on the changeless region. In effect, Shoemaker assumes absolute time, which is time without change.
3. For a general account of the two opposing schools see Richard M. Gale, The Language of Time (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), 3-33.
4. There has been some refinement since, particularly as regards the translation of the language of the one school into that of the other, and with some interesting discussion of truth conditions for tensed sentences - see, for example, L. Nathan Oaklander and Quentin Smith (eds.), The New Theory of Time (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994)
5. and D. H. Mellor, Real Time II (London and New York: Routledge, 1998)
6. and there is now also a four-volume collection edited by Oaklander, The Philosophy of Time (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).
7. See, for example, Gale, op. cit. note 1, 88, also P. T. Geach, Truth, Love, and Immortality (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 90.
8. Robin Le Poidevin and Murray MacBeath (eds.), The Philosophy of Time (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 6. It seems to have been expressions such as 'more past than' which made Gale think of circularity in such attempts.
9. For an account of such a series see, for example, E. V. Huntington, The Continuum and Other Types of Serial Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917). An example of a simply ordered class in such a relation is, according to Huntington (16), 'The class of all instants of time, arranged in order of priority.'
10. For an account of time as change itself see my 'Could Time be Change?' 223-232.
11. Even Michael Tooley, who wishes in some sense to bridge the gap between the rival views with 'a third way', based on causation, accepts that there are two rival views and maintains that 'tenseless concepts and facts are more basic than tensed ones' - Michael Tooley, Time, Tense, and Causation (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 29, 380-381.
12. Denis Corish, 'McTaggart's Argument', Philosophy 80 (2005), 79-80. Similarly, as I pointed out in the same paper (90), the two statements from which McTaggart would like to get a contradiction, 'Past, present and future are incompatible determinations' and 'But every event has them all' can in fact be true together. Here we see that as individuals related to each other past, present and future are incompatible, but as individuals that change their classes, present becoming past, future becoming present, they are not.
13. So 'Detroit is between New York and Chicago' is given as an example of a triadic relation in Irving M. Copi, Symbolic Logic Fifth Edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1979), 117, even though the directional relation between New York and Detroit is (roughly) the same as that between Detroit and Chicago, so that that relation, a dyadic one, is repeated: as New York is east of Detroit so Detroit is east of Chicago.
14. We could, as I pointed out in 'McTaggart's Argument', 84-85 - something which again points to the dyadic nature of past-present-future - contrive an artificial but perfectly logical similar three-term arrangement in the other dyadic series, by introducing something like the impermanence that is natural in time. So, for example, in number, if we envisage that each successive number in turn, running in the same direction, from, say, smaller to greater, has some property like that of time t at time t as a replacement - call it, whatever it is, 'numerus', or by any other arbitrary but constant name - then we have greater-than-numerus (which in turn becomes numerus), numerus, and less-than-numerus (which becomes in order less and less than numerus), a three-term situation in number exactly similar to past, present and future in time. And similarly, mutatis mutandis, for space and the more general precedes-succeeds. The situation is artificial for these other dyadic series, but the mere logical possibility, based on replacement and the repetition of the dyadic relation, of smaller-greater, left-right, say, and precedes-succeeds, is telling.
15. Aristotle, Physics II. 2. 193b31-35.
16. What the ontology may be that permits or requires such a logic I have tried to indicate in Denis Corish, 'Time Reconsidered', Philosophy 81 (2006), 81-106.
17. It involves, I believe, a developed account of time as relative, in the sense disputed in The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence - and which may be consistent with relativity theory - of which I tried to give an outline in a much earlier paper: Corish, 'The Continuum', The Review of Metaphysics XXII (1969), 523-546.
18. Also in Corish, 'Time, Space and Freewill: The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence', The Study of Time III, edited by J. T. Fraser, N. Lawrence, D. Park (New York, Heidelberg, Berlin: Springer- Verlag, 1978), 634-657, I give some consideration to why Leibniz himself did not produce such a developed, or even adequate, account.