Zeno's Paradoxes and the passage of time.
Item
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Title
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Zeno's Paradoxes and the passage of time.
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Identifier
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AAI3283589
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identifier
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3283589
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Creator
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Crome, Victor J.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Richard Mendelsohn
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Date
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2007
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Philosophy
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Abstract
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The dissertation offers some new thoughts on dynamicism , the view that there exists an objective, mind-independent passage of time. Both a positive and negative claim are made. First, it is argued that dynamicism is not undermined by McTaggart's Paradox, the famous argument according to which the very notion of temporal passage is inconsistent. It is argued that if one of two views about the existence of temporal entities obtains, real temporal passage is possible. These two views are presentism, according to which only the present exists, or the open future, where only the past and present exist.;Second, a relationship is drawn between the structure of time and the possibility of temporal passage. It is argued that if space and time are dense, i.e. between any two points of space and time there is another, then temporal passage is only possible if everyday motion defies explanation. Within this argument, I discuss Zeno's Paradoxes of motion, the Wall Paradoxes and alternate accounts of the continuum: Abraham Robinson's non-standard analysis and John Bell's smooth infinitesimal analysis. I conclude that if there is to be real temporal passage, then we must deny that points of time are densely ordered. Instead, we can take space and time to be structured in accord with Bell's smooth infinitesimal analysis.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
