∗ Apologies to Mark Hinchliff for stealing the title of his dissertation. (See Hinchliff, A Defense of Presentism. As it turns out, however, the version of Presentism defended here is different from the version defended by Hinchliff. See Section 3.1 below.).

The main topic of the following dissertation is Kant's Third Analogy of Experience, which asserts that one must posit a bond of mutual interaction in order to judge that two substances exist simultaneously. Part One considers the Third Analogy proper and reconstructs two plausible arguments for its main claim. Contrary to the view of most commentators , Kant is entitled to a strong causal notion of mutual interaction. Part Two considers the historical debate between proponents of Pre-established Harmony, Occasionalism, and (...) Physical Influx and how the Third Analogy can be seen as Kant's most developed version of Physical Influx. Thus, we see that Kant's concern with causality is not exhausted by his reply to Hume in the Second Analogy of Experience. For Kant is clearly concerned to attack the rationalist tradition by criticizing Leibniz's and Wolff's Pre-established Harmony, on the one hand, and the Cartesians' and Malebranche's Occasionalism, on the other hand. Part Three considers the argumentative structure of Kant's Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft and how the Third Analogy relates to this work. Contrary to what one might expect, the MAdN does not proceed by first presupposing a Principle from the first Critique and then substituting in the concept of matter. Rather, its substantial results are obtained through an extended transcendental argument showing how we can have experience of objects of outer sense . Further, we see how the abstract notion of mutual interaction involved in the Third Analogy becomes more specific in the MAdN since two of the most important features of its central notion of matter, namely the capacities of filling a space and of communicating motion, require attractive and repulsive forces and action and reaction, both instances of mutual interaction. These three lines of argument establish that the Third Analogy of Experience both constitutes a crucial part of Kant's position and presents a philosophically plausible view. (shrink)

We say "the grass is green" or "lemons are yellow" to state what everyone knows. But are the things we see around us really colored, or do they only look that way because of the effects of light rays on our eyes and brains? Is color somehow "unreal" or "subjective" and dependent on our human perceptions and the conditions under which we see things? Distinguished scholar Barry Stroud investigates these and related questions in The Quest for Reality. In this long-awaited (...) book, he examines what a person would have to do and believe in order to reach the conclusion that everyone's perceptions and beliefs about the color of things are "illusions" and do not accurately represent the way things are in the world as it is independently of us. Arguing that no such conclusion could be consistently reached, Stroud finds that the conditions of a successful unmasking of color cannot all be fulfilled. The discussion extends beyond color to present a serious challenge to many other philosophical attempts to discover the way things really are. A model of subtle, elegant, and rigorous philosophical writing, this study will attract a wide audience from all areas of philosophy. (shrink)

Salmon, following Reichenbach and others, maintained that distant simultaneity was conventional in a special relativistic world in a way in which this was not so in prerelativistic spacetime. This paper surveys and criticizes a number of proposals to unpack this claim. It goes on to argue that if the claim has validity, it rests upon differing facts about epistemic accessibility of temporal relations in the different spacetimes, and not directly upon any facts about differing causal structures in these worlds.

I discuss theories about the way in which we determine the precedence ofperceived events. I examine Mellor’s account, which claims that it is thetiming of our perceptions of events that enables us to determine their order,and Dennett’s criticism of this. Dennett cites psychological experimentswhich suggest that it is the content of our perceptions, rather than theirtiming, which allows us to determine the order of the events perceived. Iargue that by distinguishing between two different ways of construing‘perception’ we can see not (...) only that the two accounts are compatible, but that Dennett’s account presupposes Mellor’s. (shrink)

This is a very important book. It has already become required reading for researchers on the relation between the exact sciences and Kant’s philosophy. The main theme is that Kant’s continuing program to find a metaphysics that could provide a foundation for the science of his day is of crucial importance to understanding the development of his philosophical thought from its earliest precritical beginnings in the thesis of 1747, right through the highwater years of the critical philosophy, to his last (...) unpublished writings in the Opus postumum. In the course of articulating this theme, Friedman has made extensive use of detailed historical information about their scientific and mathematical background to illuminate Kant’s texts. Over and over again, such information is used to suggest interesting and quite subtle interpretations for texts that may have seemed puzzling or just wrong-headed. (shrink)

Little, Brown, 1992 Review by Glenn Branch on Jul 5th 1999 Volume: 3, Number: 27.

The theorist who denies the objective reality of non-relational temporal properties, or ‘A-series’ determinations, must explain our experience of the passage of time. D.H. Mellor, a prominent denier of the objective reality of temporal passage, draws, in part, on Kant in offering a theory according to which the experience of temporal passage is the result of the projection of change in belief. But Mellor has missed some important points Kant has to make about time-awareness. It turns out that Kant's theory (...) of time-awareness also involves projection – but for him, the projection of temporal passage is necessary to any coherent experience at all, and for this reason events in the world cannot be represented except as exhibiting real tensed change. Consequently we cannot intelligibly suppose the world we know to be without the passage of time. This fact would permit a modest transcendental argument the conclusion of which is that we are entitled to describe the world in terms of temporal passage. (shrink)

Relativity is the most important scientific idea of the twentieth century. Albert Einstein is the unquestioned founder of modern physics. His Special and General theories of Relativity introduced the idea to the world. In this classic short book he explains clearly, using the minimum amount of mathematical terms, the basic ideas and principles of his theory of Relativity. Unsurpassed by any subsequent books on Relativity, this remains the most popular and useful exposition of Einstein's immense contribution to human knowledge.

Kant was centrally concerned with issues in the philosophy of natural science throughout his career. The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science presents his most mature reflections on these themes in the context of both his 'critical' philosophy, presented in the Critique of Pure Reason, and the natural science of his time. This volume presents a new translation, by Michael Friedman, which is especially clear and accurate. There are explanatory notes indicating some of the main connections between the argument of the (...) Metaphysical Foundations and the first Critique - as well as parallel connections to Newton's Principia. The volume is completed by an historical and philosophical introduction and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

In this new book, Michael Friedman argues that Kant's continuing efforts to find a metaphysics that could provide a foundation for the sciences is of the utmost ...

Reproduces the text of Newton's dissertation on the nature and properties of light.

Space and time are the most fundamental features of our experience of the world, and yet they are also the most perplexing. Does time really flow, or is that simply an illusion? Did time have a beginning? What does it mean to say that time has a direction? Does space have boundaries, or is it infinite? Is change really possible? Could space and time exist in the absence of any objects or events? What, in the end, are space and time? (...) Do they really exist, or are they simply the constructions of our minds? Robin Le Poidevin provides a clear, witty, and stimulating introduction to these deep questions and many other mind-boggling puzzles and paradoxes. He gives a vivid sense of the difficulties raised by our ordinary ideas about space and time, but he also gives us the basis to think about these problems independently, avoiding large amounts of jargon and technicality. His book is an invitation to think philosophically rather than a sustained argument for particular conclusions, but Le Poidevin does advance and defend a number of controversial views. He argues, for example, that time does not actually flow, that it is possible for space and time to be both finite and yet be without boundaries, and that causation is the key to an understanding of one of the deepest mysteries of time: its direction. Drawing on a variety of vivid examples from science, history, and literature, Travels in Four Dimensions brings to life some of the most profound questions imaginable. (shrink)

This book offers a radically new account of the development and structure of the central arguments of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: the defense of the objective validity of such categories as substance, causation, and independent existence. Paul Guyer makes far more extensive use than any other commentator of historical materials from the years leading up to the publication of the Critique and surrounding its revision, and he shows that the work which has come down to us is the result (...) of some striking and only partially resolved theoretical tensions. Kant had originally intended to demonstrate the validity of the categories by exploiting what he called 'analogies of appearance' between the structure of self-knowledge and our knowledge of objects. The idea of a separate 'transcendental deduction', independent from the analysis of the necessary conditions of empirical judgements, arose only shortly before publication of the Critique in 1781, and distorted much of Kant's original inspiration. Part of what led Kant to present this deduction separately was his invention of a new pattern of argument - very different from the 'transcendental arguments' attributed by recent interpreters to Kant - depending on initial claims to necessary truth. (shrink)

In his first paper on the special theory of relativity, Einstein indicated that the question of whether or not two spatially separated events were simultaneous did not necessarily have a definite answer, but instead depended on the adoption of a convention for its resolution. Some later writers have argued that Einstein's choice of a convention is, in fact, the only possible choice within the framework of special relativistic physics, while others have maintained that alternative choices, although perhaps less convenient, are (...) indeed possible. (shrink)