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The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 95

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 95. The book is alphabetized by the whole headings of entries, as distinct from the first word of a heading. Hence, for example, abandonment comes before a priori and a posteriori. It is wise to look elsewhere if something seems to be missing. At the end of the book there is also a useful appendix on Logical Symbols as well as the appendices A Chronological Table of Philosophy and Maps of Philosophy. | 920 time time thus partaking in a tradition stretching back to Parmenides and Zeno who held the appearance of temporal change to be an illusion. In opposition to the static view stands the dynamic view of time traceable back to Aristotle and before him to Heraclitus. By this account the future lacks the reality of the past and present and indeed reality is continually being added to as time passes. The objection mentioned earlier is not difficult to overcome since even the theory ofrelativity acknowledges that some events are past and others future no matter which frame of reference is selected and these may be said to lie in the absolute past or future. The relativity ofsimultaneity only requires us to revise our conception of the present allowing it to embrace all events not causally connectable to us by a physical signal. A more serious challenge to the dynamic view of time comes from an argument of J. M. E. McTaggart who claimed that the notion of temporal becoming bound up with the A-series of past present and future leads to contradiction. But it seems fair to protest that McTaggart s argument demonstrates not so much the absurdity of the notion of temporal becoming as the incoherence of his representation of that phenomenon. According to McTaggart the phenomenon supposedly consists in future events becoming present and then receding into the past whence it apparently follows absurdly that all events are past present and future. But the lesson is just that we should not think of the present as somehow moving along the sequence of events from past to future. In denying the reality of the future we may appeal to the fact that not all future-tensed statements appear to be determinately true or false. The asymmetry of time is perhaps its most striking feature and the most difficult to explain. The fundamental laws of physics are time-reversible and yet complex macroscopic processes like the growth of a tree or the breaking of a glass could not happen in reverse .