The Moment of Change: A Systematic History in the Philosophy of Space and Time

ISBN-13: 9780792351207 / Angielski / Twarda / 1998 / 306 str.

Niko Strobach; Nico Strobach; N. Strobach

Opis

This book is a systematic history of one of the oldest problems in the philosophy of space and time: How is the change from one state to its opposite to be described? To my knowledge it is the first comprehensive book providing information about and analysis of texts on this topic throughout the ages. The target audience I envisaged are advanced students and scholars of analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy who are interested in the philosophy of space and time. Authors treated in this book range from Plato, Aristotle, the logicians of the late Middle Ages, Kant, Brentano and Russell to contemporary authors such as Chisholm, Hamblin, Sorabji or Graham Priest, taking into account such theories as interval semantics or paraconsistent logic. For the first time, two main questions about the moment of change are explicitly kept apart: Which (if any) of the opposite states does the moment of change belong to? And does it contain an instantaneous event? The texts are discussed within a clear framework of the main systematic options for describing the moment of change, sometimes using predicate logic extended by newly introduced logical prefixes. The last part contains a new suggestion of how to solve the problem of the moment of change. It is centred around a theory of instantaneous states which provides a new solution to Zeno's Flying Arrow Paradox.

Spis treści

Preface. Introduction. Part I: The Moment of Change from Antiquity to the 19th Century. 1. Plato. 2. Aristotle. 3. The Moment of Change in the Middle Ages. 4. Kant, Mendelssohn, Schopenhauer. Part II: The Moment of Change in the 20th Century. 1. The Either/Or-Option. 2. The Either-Way Option. 3. The Both-States-Option. 4. The Neither-Nor Option. 5. The Neutral Instant Analysis. Part III: A Systematic Suggestion. Introduction. Section 1. The Snapshot Myth. Section 2. A Path to a Plausible Description of the Moment of Change. Section 3. The Classification of the Moment of Change. Appendix A: A Formal Characterization of s-Changes and C-Changes. Appendix B: A Formal Version of Aristotle's Proof in Phys. 235b26ff. Appendix C: Informal Proofs for Some Important Statements Concerning First and Last Instants of States in Dense Time. Appendix D: Paraphernalia About Rest and Motion. Notes. References. Names Index. Subject Index. List of the Main Texts.