Abstract

Sydney Shoemaker argues that time without change is possible, but begs the question by assuming an, in effect, Newtonian absolute time, that 'flows equably' in a region in which there is no change and in one in which there is. An equally possible, relativist, assumption, consistent, it seems, with relativity theory, is that where nothing changes there is no time flow, though there may be elsewhere, where there is change. Such an assumption would require some revision of uncritical common thought about time. Aristotle argues that there is no time without change but that time is not change. His arguments for the latter can be faulted both internally and again in terms of the same relativist assumption. From the Physics we can derive, though Aristotle himself did not, an argument that time is to change as geometrical space is to body: the thing itself in abstraction