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Sunday, October 30, 2011

The Philosophy Of Time edited by Robin Le Poidevin & Murray MacBeath

The Philosophy of Time - Oxford Readings in Philosophy
I did a whole raft of stuff on this as a part of my masters degree. I was looking at it from the point of view of a scientist - so my study was focussed on the physical rather than the metaphysical. Poidevin notes in his introduction that the essays come from the philosopher's point of view - they're interested with necessity and ontology rather than interpretation of evidence or speculation arising from mathematical theory. Which is quite different from what i'd done before.
However, I'm not sure that a pre, or a-, scientific exploration of this kind of theme is really sustainable when one has to deal with ideas such as quantum mechanics and all its varied self consistent interpretations. If you can demonstrate that many worlds with branching timelines is mathematically viable then arguing about it's credibility from a non-mathematical point of view seems a bit redundant.

Some of the other discussions are more interesting - focusing as they do on the idea of multidimensional time schemes and whether speculating using possible worlds even makes sense.

In all this was interesting but particularly clear was the essay on Time's Square. However I think the metaphysics on display arising from considering the mathematical frameworks we've built over the last one hundreds years is likely to be more profitable - even if those frameworks turn out to be too limited and simplistic in their view of the cosmos.

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