The Moment of Change: A Systematic History in the Philosophy of Space and Time / Edition 1

by N. Strobach

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780792351207
Publisher:	Springer Netherlands
Publication date:	08/31/1998
Series:	The New Synthese Historical Library , #45
Edition description:	1998
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.24(d)

Table of Contents

1. Plato.- 2. Aristotle.- 3. The Moment of Change in the Middle Ages.- 4. Kant, Mendelssohn, Schopenhauer.- 1. The Either/or-Option (Sorabji, Jackson And Pargetter, Galton).- 2. The Either-Way-Option (Chisholm, Medlin).- 3. The both-states-option (G. Priest).- 4. The Neither/Nor-Option (Hamblin).- 5. The Neutral Instant Analysis (Bosk, Russell, Kretzmann).- 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.- List of the Main Texts.