PhilosophyBy David - April 5, 2006 1:50 am
I took one course in philosophy of time and I found it to be the most difficult sub-discipline in philosophy. Every once in a while, I think I have a grasp of some of the keys issues, only to be utterly confused a short while later. Philosophy students will know what I’m talking about. Alan Rhoda has a post up about Presentism, the view that the present is coextensive with the real, and tries to respond to an important objection from Robin Le Poidevin by “ground[ing] truths about the past in God’s memories”. He promises “to reflect more on that in a succeeding post.”
In engineering, you have to learn to transform events from the ‘time domain’ to other domains. (Such as frequency domain using Fourier transforms or S domain using Laplace.) It is a mind bending exercise, but it has occurred to me that there is an obvious philosophical analog. Events can not be fully described as discrete, time-ordered objects. It is only that our natural perception uses the time-domain to experience these objects, while we do not natively perceive other characteristics which are there, but are only evident in other domains. In the same manner, the time ordered characteristics of an event are preserved (as ‘phase’ information, for example) even after the transform has occurred, but are not evident until a reverse transform is performed.
I’m not sure what the philosophical implications of this are, but it’s interesting to think about while stuck in traffic.
Comment by dbs — April 6, 2006 @ 10:07 am
You’re touching on some key philosophical issues. But, as I admitted in the post, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around some of these issues, even after having read about them.
I fully agree that it’s interesting to think about while stuck in traffic, though.
Comment by sagoboulevard — April 6, 2006 @ 11:14 am
I’m not sure when the class was, but “time and process in ancient judaism” was out in late 2003. a good review is here;
http://h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.cgi?path=214411119645706
i think we met at hamivtar, early 2004 at an in shabbos.
you were leaving hamivtar maybe motzei shabbos?
Comment by pierre — April 6, 2006 @ 1:39 pm
Pierre, you’re right. I think we did meet.
Comment by sagoboulevard — April 9, 2006 @ 4:08 pm