The Roots of C. D. Broad’s Growing Block Theory of Time

Thomas, Emily

doi:10.1093/mind/fzx020

Cited by 14 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…EmilyThomas (2019) maintains that a view such as this can already be found some years earlier in Samuel Alexander, and that Broad might even have taken it from that source. A well-known recent defence of the growing block theory comes from MichaelTooley (1997).…”

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confidence: 90%

What Bergson should have said about special relativity

Kügler

2020

Synthese

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The debate between Einstein and Bergson is a salient episode in the history of modern physics and a telling example of the interaction between science and philosophy. This paper initially discusses five reasons why Bergson criticised Einstein for giving up absolute time. The most important one was Bergson's commitment to an intuitionist, anti-Kantian metaphysics informed by common sense. Apart from that, he knew that the theory of special relativity permits "duration" (durée) in the form of the passage of proper time, to which Bergson referred as "real time". Neither static eternalism (which excludes temporal passage) nor dynamic eternalism (which, like the former, claims the existence of the future) are acceptable from Bergson's philosophical perspective, which acknowledges the role of temporal experience and everyday thinking in addition to science and metaphysics. He understood temporal passage as creation of new existence, anticipating what later became known as the growing block theory of time. The pointy relativistic variant of this theory, which divides the universe into blocks of growing past light cones, does justice to large parts of his philosophy, including the distinction between the actual and the virtual. Supporters of Bergson's account of duration should adopt this theory of time.

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confidence: 90%

What Bergson should have said about special relativity

Kügler

2020

Synthese

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“…Thomas (2019, p. 546) suggests that, while many theorists wrote papers and books discussing Broad’s theory, few accepted it. Thomas argues that the large literature on Broad’s theory, even though negative, is what helped sustain it.…”

Section: A Network Analysis Centered On James and Stracheymentioning

confidence: 99%

Creators of the Vocabulary of Anglophone Psychology and Their Relationships

Benjafield

2022

Review of General Psychology

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The vocabulary of anglophone psychology largely developed during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The creators of this vocabulary include such well-known names as William James, Joan Riviere, E. L. Thorndike, and James Strachey. Along with others, they invented many new words and word meanings for psychology. The more a psychologist responded to the need for new vocabulary the more likely were they to be mentioned in publications. Moreover, linguistically creative psychologists occurred together in publications to a greater extent than less linguistically creative psychologists, with William James having the most co-occurrences. A network is presented that links each member of a sample of 59 linguistically creative psychologists to the other member of the sample with whom they most frequently co-occur (e.g., E. L. Thorndike co-occurs most frequently with William James). For each pair, we provide brief descriptions of their similarities and/or differences. There is also a cluster of translators who created new English words and word meanings in order to capture the meanings of words in other languages that had no satisfactory equivalents in English. Generally speaking, the more success psychologists have had in filling the lacunae in psychology’s vocabulary, the more they have been recognized by others.

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“…Thus, he seems to believe that time by itself leads to presentism, yet space and time together leads to eternalism. On Alexander's eternalism more widely, see Thomas (2017: §3).…”

Section: Sinclair's Core Argument For Idealismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Idealism and Pantheism of May Sinclair

Thomas¹

2019

J. of the Am. Philos. Assoc.

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During the early twentieth century, British novelist and philosopher May Sinclair published two book-length defenses of idealism. Although Sinclair is well known to literary scholars, she is little known to the history of philosophy. This paper provides the first substantial scholarship on Sinclair's philosophical views, focusing on her mature idealism. Although Sinclair is working within the larger British idealist tradition, her argument for Absolute idealism is unique, founded on Samuel Alexander's new realist beliefs about the reality of time. Her metaphysics takes idealism and pantheism in new directions and provides fresh insight into 1920s debates between British idealisms and realisms.

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The Roots of C. D. Broad’s Growing Block Theory of Time

Cited by 14 publications

References 31 publications

What Bergson should have said about special relativity

What Bergson should have said about special relativity

Creators of the Vocabulary of Anglophone Psychology and Their Relationships

The Idealism and Pantheism of May Sinclair

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