The moment of change : a systematic history in the philosophy of space and time / by Nico Strobach.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Strobach, Niko.

Contributor:

Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

Series:

New synthese historical library ; v. 45.

The New synthese historical library ; v. 45

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Space and time--History.

Space and time.

History.

Physical Description:

xii, 302 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Dordrecht ; Boston : Kluwer Academic Publishers, [1998]

Summary:

The Moment of Change is the first 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? Authors treated in this book range from Plato, Aristotle, medieval logicians, Kant, Brentano and Russell to contemporary authors, taking into account such theories as interval semantics and paraconsistent logic. The texts are analysed under two main aspects: Which (if any) of the opposite states does the moment of change belong to? And does it contain an instantaneous event? In the last part a new way of treating the moment of change is developed, which leads to a solution to Zeno's Flying Arrow Paradox. Audience: The book will be of interest to advanced students and scholars of analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy.

Contents:

2. Form 13

Part I The Moment of Change From Antiquity to the 19th Century

1. Plato 20

1.1. The digression on the sudden in Plato's 'Parmenides' 20

1.2. The logical status of the sudden 25

1.3. The ontological status of the sudden (two possible interpretations) 32

1.4. Historical digression (Aulus Gellius, Sextus Empiricus, St. Augstine) 41

1.5. Description and classification of the moment of change according to Plato-1 and Plato-2 45

2. Aristotle 47

2.1. Aristotle. Physics VI and VIII - Basics 48

2.2. The moment of change between comparative properties 50

2.3. The moment of change between non-comparative properties 55

2.4. [characters not reproducible] 63

2.5. [characters not reproducible] 75

2.6. Aristotle's classification of the moment of change 78

2.8. Postscript: Plato and Aristotle 81

3. The Moment of Change in the Middle Ages 84

3.2. The content of medieval incipit-/desinit analyses 86

3.3. The form of medieval incipit-/desinit analyses 98

3.4. Description and classification of the moment of change in the Middle Ages 108

4. Kant, Mendelssohn, Schopenhauer 111

4.1. Historical Preliminaries 111

4.2. Kant vs. Mendelssohn 112

4.3. Schopenhauer 121

Part II The Moment of Change in the 20th Century

1. The Either/or-Option (Sorabji, Jackson and Pargetter, Galton) 124

1.0. Survey of part II and chapter II.1 124

1.1. Richard Sorabji, Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter: Tying the description of the moment of change between rest and motion to the concept of momentary velocity 125

1.2. Antony Galton's 'Logic of Aspect' 131

1.3. Advantages, disadvantages and a dilemma of using the either/or-option 145

2. The Either-Way-Option (Chisholm, Medlin) 146

2.1. Roderick Chisholm and Franz Brentano 146

2.2. Brian Medlin: 'The Origin of Motion' 154

2.3. Evaluation 160

3. The Both-States-Option (G. Priest) 161

3.1. Objective contradictions 161

3.2. The moment of change in paraconsistent logic 163

3.3. The motivation for applying the Leibnizian principle 167

3.4. Criticism of Priest's approach 168

4. The Neither/Nor-Option (Hamblin) 171

4.1. Hamblin's interval semantics 171

4.2. Time without instants? 173

4.3. Hamblin's suggestion for describing the moment of change 175

4.4. Instants as assistants to intervals 177

4.5. The moment of change in modified interval semantics (with instants) 177

4.6. Nonsense as the reason for applying interval semantics to the moment of change 178

4.7. Evaluation 180

5. The Neutral Instant Analysis (Bostock, Russell, Kretzmann) 183

5.1. A good compromise 183

5.2. The adherents of the Neutral Instant Analysis and their motivation 186

5.3. A transformation of Kretzmann's and the Russelian definitions 194

5.4. More work to do 196

Part III A Systematic Suggestion

Section 1 The Snapshot Myth 201

Section 2 A Path to a Plausible Description of the Moment of Change 206

Section 3 The Classification of the Moment of Change 225

Appendix A A formal characterization of s-changes and C-changes 235

Appendix B A formal version of Aristotle's proof in Phys. 235b26ff 238

Appendix C Informal proofs for some important statements concerning first and last instants of states in dense time 240

Appendix D Paraphernalia about rest and motion 242.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-289) and indexes.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

ISBN:

0792351207

OCLC:

39189882