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Time: Stanford Philosophy

Conversation on the inner workings of time, have stood at the forefront of Philosophy since the beginning of the field, and they have been particularly prominent in the 20th Century.

1.) Fatalism

One source of the knowledge of time in philosophy, was the worry about Fatalism, the perspective that the events of the future have already been decided, and thus the future is unavoidable.

The argument for Fatalism typically proceeds as follows:

There are assertions that can be made about everything that may take place in the future.

Every proposition is either true or false.

If 1∧21 \land 2, then there exists a set of true propositions that, together, correctly predict the events of the future.

If this set of propositions exists currently, then the future, whatever will happen in the future is unavoidable.

One thing that comes to mind is the fact that the correct following of some of these propositions, may effect the truth value of elements in the set to come: in short the set of true propositions about the future may be reflexive, or adaptive.

This would mean that the set of correct propositions, are not any set that is available at one point in time (the present), but rather the intersections of sets of propositions over time, qualified by the fact that they are the correct elements, or are elements of the correct set.

This gets really trippy when you think about the fact that is set may very logically be considered infinite. Fatalism is avoided because the future, while unavoidable, is not static, is ever changing, and thus is never 100% predictable.

The future is unavoidable.

Some of the arguments against Fatalism target points (2) and (4), stating that the law of excluded middles may not apply, and that it's not necessarily true that no one is able to make a true prediction turn out false.

For instance, "you will have lunch tomorrow", can not be assigned a truth value in the moment, and is indeterminate until tomorrow comes to pass.

The idea that these kinds of statements exist, is often referred to as the Open Future response to Fatalism.

The Open Future response presumes that it makes sense, or is logically valid, to talk about an proposition having a truth value at a time, and that a proposition can take different values at different times.

The Open Future response entails the following points:

The Tensed View of Semantics

Propositions have truth values at times, as opposed to having eternal truth values.

The fundamental semantic phrasing is p is v at t\small \text{p is v at t}, where p is a proposition, v is a truth value, and t is a time.

A proposition can have different v's at differen't t's.

2.) Reductionism, Platonism & Time

Some people entertain the idea, that there are possibly periods of time in which nothing changes, and this question is largely driven by the desire to understand whether or not time is independent of the events it "contains".

The thinking goes that if there can be a passage of time without change, time could exists without events, and if not, then time only exists if there are events to fill it.

Aristotle, however, rejected the idea of independently existing time, as he considered time to be motion, and thus felt that time was a result of dynamical objects.

In short, Aristotle embraced Reductionism with respect to Time, as all talk about time can be reduced to temporal relationships between objects and events.

On the other hand, Plato and Newton, felt that time existed regardless of whether or not there were events going on inside of it.

They viewed time as a sort of container, which could contain things, and events, but wasn't required to, in order to exist.

Referenced in

Time: Stanford Philosophy