Other Philosophy Commons^™

I Am Becoming., Dai Asano

Masters Theses

This is a collection of essays documenting my grappling with the idea that time is always in motion. When you say now, it is not now anymore, but we are still in now, a new now. How can I stay in the now without being swept away by the current of time? Describing a film by Ozu Yasujiro, Deleuze writes, “The vase in Late Spring is interposed between the daughter’s half smile and the beginning of her tears. There is becoming, change, passage. But the form of what changes does not itself change does not pass on. This is time, …

Embodied Abstractions: Identity And Representation In The Digital Era, Srikar Hari

Masters Theses

The digital image is a copy in motion. As it accelerates, it deteriorates.

It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, squeezed through

digital connections, resized, uploaded, downloaded, reformatted

and re-edited.

- Adapted from “In defense of the Poor Image” by Hito Steryel

With today’s digital technology, the image is no longer a stable

representation of the world, but a programmable database that

is updated in real time. It is not only part of a program, but it

contains its own operating code: the image is a program in itself.

Consequently, the image’s rhetoric has taken on …

Empty Time As Traumatic Duration: Towards A Cinematic Aevum, Kelli Fuery

Film and Media Arts Faculty Articles and Research

Frank Kermode uses the term aevum to question the links between origin, order, and time, associating experience with spatial form. Without end or beginning, aevum identifies an intersubjective order of time where we participate in the “relation between the fictions by which we order our world and the increasing complexity of what we take to be the ‘real’ history of that world”; being “in-between” time is a primary quality of the aevum. Regarding cinema, aevum identifies this third duration as emotional experience, occuring as traumatic time. It facilitates thinking beyond lived temporal experience of everyday life to a philosophy …

Plato's Parmenides: On Being And Non-Being, Syed Husain

Student Theses and Dissertations

In this paper I will discuss the Eight Hypotheses in Plato's Parmenides and draw out my own conclusion from them without any external help or secondary literature. I will then use this conclusion to address problems concerning the Parmenides in the Platonic Scholarship. The main conclusion I have drawn is that the Hypotheses are closing the gulf between Being and Non-Being via the concepts of Sameness, Difference, Becoming, Time and the Instant. In addition, the confluence of Being and Non-Being illuminates a subsidiary conclusion of this text possessing grounds for a new metaphysical presupposition of Being-Non-Being. I propose in this …

Can God Know What Time It Is? A Working Paper, Caleb Brown

Quaerens Deum: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal for Philosophy of Religion

Many thinkers hold the following five propositions are inconsistent:

1. The dynamic theory of time (McTaggart’s “A-theory”) is correct
2. God is atemporal
3. God knows tensed facts
4. Free human actions are possible
5. God interacts responsively with humans

This working paper uses the discussion in Four Views: God and Time as a starting-point and moves towards explaining how these propositions are consistent.

Malagasy Time Conceptions, Casey Woodling

Comparative Philosophy

In this paper I discuss Øyvind Dahl’s argument (1995,1999) for the conclusion that Malagasy people conceive of the future as coming from behind them and not as being before them as most worldviews do. I argue that we have good reason not to attribute this view to Malagasy people. First, it would mark an inefficient and anomalous way of keeping track of the past and future. Second, the linguistic and testimonial evidence presented by Dahl doesn’t support the conclusion. Even though this specific argument fails, Dahl has many enlightening things to say about Malagasy time conceptions, such as the various …

Between The Internal And The External: Kant’S And Patañjali’S Arguments For The Reality Of Physical Objects And Their Independence From Mind, Ana Laura Funes Maderey

Comparative Philosophy

Although coming from two very different paths, both Kant and Patañjali present similar strategies to refute the skeptic argument that denies the real and independent existence of physical objects. This essay examines both strategies through the reconstruction of Kant’s and Patañjali’s twofold refutation of idealism: one based on the perceptual distinction between the real and the illusory, and the other one based on the ontological necessity of a permanent external object to understand change. I argue that the second strategy is philosophically stronger due to its phenomenological recognition of the body as a grounding point, and that this is possible …

Models Of Time Travel And Their Consequences, Antonio M. Mantica

Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research

How do we travel through time? We know that we can move forward in it (we have no choice), but can we jump forward in time? Can we go backward in time? It also gives rise to other troubling questions: is time measurable in distinct increments, or does it flow continuously? In "Models of Time Travel and their Consequences," Antonio Mantica walks the reader through current understandings of how time functions in Einstein's universe and proposes three distinct models to explain it. Following that, he provides a list of experiments to credit or discredit the models. Appropriate for audiences of …

Fundamental Mathematics Of Consciousness, Menas Kafatos

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

We explore a mathematical formalism that ties together the observer with the observed in the view that Consciousness is primary, operating through three principles which apply at all levels, the essence of qualia of experience. The formalism is a simplified version of Hilbert space mathematics encountered in quantum mechanics. It does, however, go beyond specific interpretations of quantum mechanics and has strong philosophical foundations in Western philosophy as well as monistic systems of the East. The implications are explored and steps for the full development of this axiomatic mathematical approach to Consciousness are discussed.