Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The B-theory of time, also called the "tenseless theory of time", is one of two positions regarding the temporal ordering of events in the philosophy of time.B-theorists argue that the flow of time is only a subjective illusion of human consciousness, that the past, present, and future are equally real, and that time is tenseless: temporal becoming is not an objective feature of reality.
In the first mode, events are ordered as future, present, and past.Futurity and pastness allow of degrees, while the present does not. When we speak of time in this way, we are speaking in terms of a series of positions which run from the remote past through the recent past to the present, and from the present through the near future all the way to the remote future.
This conception of an individual as always present is opposed to perdurantism or four-dimensionalism, which maintains that an object is a series of temporal parts or stages, requiring a B-theory of time. The use of "endure" and "perdure" to distinguish two ways in which an object can be thought to persist can be traced to David Lewis.
Perdurantism or perdurance theory is a philosophical theory of persistence and identity. [1] In metaphysics the debate over persistence currently involves three competing theories—one three-dimensionalist theory called "endurantism" and two four-dimensionalist theories called "perdurantism" and "exdurantism". For a perdurantist, all objects ...
The origins of the cosmological argument can be traced to classical antiquity, rooted in the concept of the prime mover, introduced by Aristotle.In the 6th century, Syriac Christian theologian John Philoponus (c. 490–c. 570) proposed the first known version of the argument based on the impossibility of an infinite temporal regress, postulating that time itself must have had a beginning.
Perdurantism—or perdurance theory—is a closely related philosophical theory of persistence and identity, [4] according to which an individual has distinct temporal parts throughout its existence, and the persisting object is the sum or set of all of its temporal parts.
Some philosophers appeal to a specific theory that is "timeless" in a more radical sense than the rest of physics, the theory of quantum gravity. This theory is used, for instance, in Julian Barbour's theory of timelessness. [22] On the other hand, George Ellis argues that time is absent in cosmological theories because of the details they ...
David Lewis theorized that events are merely spatiotemporal regions and properties (i.e. membership of a class).He defines an event as "e is an event only if it is a class of spatiotemporal regions, both thisworldly (assuming it occurs in the actual world) and otherworldly."