This paper investigates what the source of time-asymmetry is in thermodynamics, and comments on the question whether a time-symmetric formulation of the Second Law is possible.

This paper investigates what the source of time asymmetry is in thermodynamics, and comments on the question whether a time-symmetric formulation of the Second Law is possible.

The recent renewal of interest in the philosophy of Henri Bergson has increased both recognition of his influence on twentieth-century philosophy and attention to his relationship to phenomenology. Until now, the question of Martin Heidegger’s debt to Bergson has remained largely unanswered. Heidegger’s brief discussion of Bergson in Being and Time is geared toward explaining why he fails in his attempts to think more radically about time. Despite this dismissal, a close look at Heidegger’s early works dealing with (...) temporality reveals a sustained engagement with Bergson’s thought. In The Origin of Time, Heath Massey evaluates Heidegger’s critique of Bergson and examines how Bergson’s efforts to rethink time in terms of duration anticipate Heidegger’s own interpretation of temporality. Massey demonstrates how Heidegger follows Bergson in seeking to uncover “primordial time” by disentangling temporality from spatiality, how he associates Bergson with the tradition of philosophy that covers up this phenomenon, and how he overlooks Bergson’s ontological turn in Matter and Memory. Through close readings of early major works by both thinkers, Massey argues that Bergson is a much more radical thinker with respect to time than Heidegger allows. (shrink)

The local Lorentz and diffeomorphism symmetries of Einstein's gravitational theory are spontaneously broken by a Higgs mechanism by invoking a phase transition in the early universe, at a critical temperature Tc below which the symmetry is restored. The spontaneous breakdown of the vacuum state generates an external time, and the wave function of the universe satisfies a time-dependent Schrödinger equation, which reduces to the Wheeler-deWitt equation in the classical regime for T (...) wave function. The conservation of energy is spontaneously violated for T>Tc, and matter is created fractions of seconds after the big bang, generating the matter in the Universe. The time direction of the vacuum expectation value of the scalar Higgs field generates a time asymmetry, which defines the cosmological arrow of time and the direction of increasing entropy as the Lorentz symmetry is restored at low temperatures. (shrink)

Irish literature after Yeats and Joyce, from the 1920s onwards, includes texts which have been the subject of much contention. For a start how should Irish literature be defined: as works which have been written in Irish or as works written in Englsih by the Irish? It is a period in whichideas of Ireland--of people, community, and nation--have been both created and reflected, and in which conceptions of a distinct Irish identity have been articulated, defended, and challenged; a period which (...) has its origins in a time of intense political turmoil. `after Yeats and Joyce' alsosuggests the immense influence of these two writers on the style, stances, and preoccupations of twentieth-century Irish literature. Neil Corcoran focuses his chapter on various themes such as `the Big House', the rural and provincial, with reference to authors from Kinsella and Beckett to WilliamTrevor, Seamus Heaney, and Mary Lavin, providing a lucid and far-reaching introduction to modern Irish writing. (shrink)

J. David Archibald explores how Darwin first came to the conclusion that species had evolved in different regions throughout the world. Carefully retracing Darwin's gathering of evidence and the evolution of his thinking, Origins of Darwin's Evolution achieves a new understanding of how Darwin crafted his transformative theory.

It is widely hoped that quantum gravity will shed light on the question of the origin of time in physics. The currently dominant approaches to a candidate quantum theory of gravity have naturally evolved from general relativity, on the one hand, and from particle physics, on the other hand. A third important branch of twentieth century ‘fundamental’ physics, condensed-matter physics, also offers an interesting perspective on quantum gravity, and thereby on the problem of time. The bottomline might (...) sound disappointing: to understand the origin of time, much more experimental input is needed than what is available today. Moreover it is far from obvious that we will ever find out the true origin of physical time, even if we become able to directly probe physics at the Planck scale. But we might learn some interesting lessons about time and the structure of our universe in the process. A first lesson is that there are probably several characteristic scales associated with “quantum gravity” effects, rather than the single Planck scale usually considered. These can differ by several orders of magnitude, and thereby conspire to hide certain effects expected from quantum gravity, rendering them undetectable even with Planck-scale experiments. A more tentative conclusion is that the hierarchy between general relativity, special relativity and Newtonian physics, usually taken for granted, might have to be interpreted with caution. (shrink)

Onians' remarkable work of scholarship sought to deal with the very roots of European civilization and thought: the fundamental beliefs about life, mind, body, soul, and human destiny that are embodied in the myths and legends of the ancients. The volume is remains a fascinating collection of ideas and explanations of cultures as diverse as the Greeks and the Norse, the Celts and the Jews, and the Chinese and the Romans.

This remarkable work of scholarship sought to deal with the very roots of European civilisation and thought: the fundamental beliefs about life, mind, body, soul and human destiny which were embodied in the myths, legends and customs of the ancients and later emerged, often unrecognized, in literature, philosophy and science. Professor Onians adduces an extraordinary range of comparative evidence, predominantly from Greece and Rome, but also from Norse, Celtic, Jewish, Indian, Chinese and Christian sources. The volume remains a fascinating compendium (...) of ideas, conjectures and explanations which can continue to stimulate and inform the anthropologist, historian of science and philosophy, and classicist. (shrink)

This investigation of time and space is motivated by gaps in our current understanding: by the lack of definitions, by our failure to appreciate the nature of these entities, by our inability to pin down their properties. The author's approach is based on two key ideas: The first idea is to seek the geo-historical origins of time and space concepts. A thorough investigation of a diversified archaeological corpus, allows him to draft coherent definitions; it furthermore gives clues as (...) to whether time and space were discovered or invented. The second idea is to define the units before trying to define space and time. The results presented here are unexpected: Time and space were not discovered in nature, but they were invented; time is not a phenomenon and space has no materiality; they are only concepts. This runs contrary to the opinion of most scientific and the philosophical authorities, although one would seek in vain for a theoretical validation of the conventional position. This book will provide much food for thought for philosophers and scientists, as well as interested general readers. (shrink)

_Origins of Chinese Political Philosophy_. explores the composition, language, thought, and early history of the _Shangshu_ (Classic of Documents), showing its texts as dynamic cultural products that expressed and shaped the political and intellectual discourses of different times and communities.

Time arises in the theory of gravity through the semiclassical approximation of the gravitational part of the solution of the Wheeler-De Witt equation in the manner shown by Banks (SCAG). We generalize Banks' procedure by grafting a Born-Oppenheimer type approximation onto SCAG. This allows for the feedback of matter onto gravity, wherein the latter is driven by the (quantum) mean energy-momentum tensor of matter. The wave function is nonvanishing in classically forbidden configurations of gravity. In SCAG this is described (...) by the evolution of matter in imaginary time. This is interpreted as an inverse temperature, and the norm of the matter wave function, no longer conserved for these gravitational configurations, is a partition function. A simple cosmological model is worked out to illustrate these ideas. In this model it is shown that the temperature of the matter which emerges into the classically permitted region is the inverse bounce time of the bounce executed by the system in the forbidden region (behind the horizon).Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future. And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.—T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,”Four Quartets, 1943. (shrink)

_Origins of Chinese Political Philosophy_. explores the composition, language, thought, and early history of the _Shangshu_ (Classic of Documents), showing its texts as dynamic cultural products that expressed and shaped the political and intellectual discourses of different times and communities.

Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt/M., New York, Oxford, Wien Schweizer Asiatische Studien. Monographien. Bd. 43. Herausgegeben von Robert Gassmann. This book deals with the ru, a word too often understood as a reference to 'Confucian literati'. The study consists of two parts. In the first part the author discusses the problem of the origins of the ru and presents the main hypotheses offered by modern Chinese scholars in this respect. The second part examines the status and nature of a number of (...) ru at a very important period in their history, namely the Qin dynasty and the early Han dynasty (3rd to 2nd centuries B.C.), with the interpretation of famous episodes such as the 'execution of literati' in 212, and the so-called 'victory of Confucianism' one century later. Contents: The ru - from early times to the beginning of the twentieth century - HuShi's Shuo ru - Criticism of Hu Shi's Shuo ru - After Hu Shi: variations on the wang guan shuo - Other recent theories on the origins of the ru - The Erudites (boshi) until the early Han dynasty - The execution of 212 B.C. - The ru during Emperor Gaozu's reign - The ru under Emperor Wu's rule. (shrink)

Since the Industrial Revolution, human societies have experienced high and sustained rates of economic growth. Recent explanations of this sudden and massive change in economic history have held that modern growth results from an acceleration of innovation. But it is unclear why the rate of innovation drastically accelerated in England in the eighteenth century. An important factor might be the alteration of individual preferences with regard to innovation resulting from the unprecedented living standards of the English during that period, for (...) two reasons. First, recent developments in economic history challenge the standard Malthusian view according to which living standards were stagnant until the Industrial Revolution. Pre-industrial England enjoyed a level of affluence that was unprecedented in history. Second, behavioral sciences have demonstrated that the human brain is designed to respond adaptively to variations in resources in the local environment. In particular, Life History Theory, a branch of evolutionary biology, suggests that a more favorable environment should trigger the expression of future-oriented preferences. In this paper, I argue that some of these psychological traits – a lower level of time discounting, a higher level of optimism, decreased materialistic orientation, and a higher level of trust in others – are likely to increase the rate of innovation. I review the evidence regarding the impact of affluence on preferences in contemporary as well as past populations, and conclude that the impact of affluence on neurocognitive systems may partly explain the modern acceleration of technological innovations and the associated economic growth. (shrink)

We fear that the growing threat of violent attack has upset the balance between existential concepts of political power, which emphasize security, and traditional notions of constitutional limits meant to protect civil liberties. We worry that constitutional states cannot, during a time of war, terror, and extreme crisis, maintain legality and preserve civil rights and freedoms. David Williams Bates allays these concerns by revisiting the theoretical origins of the modern constitutional state, which, he argues, recognized and made room for (...) tensions among law, war, and the social order. We traditionally associate the Enlightenment with the taming of absolutist sovereign power through the establishment of a legal state based on the rights of individuals. In his critical rereading, Bates shows instead that Enlightenment thinkers conceived of political autonomy in a systematic, theoretical way. Focusing on the nature of foundational violence, war, and existential crises, eighteenth-century thinkers understood law and constitutional order not as constraints on political power but as the logical implication of that primordial force. Returning to the origin stories that informed the beginnings of political community, Bates reclaims the idea of law, warfare, and the social order as intertwining elements subject to complex historical development. Following an analysis of seminal works by seventeenth-century natural-law theorists, Bates reviews the major canonical thinkers of constitutional theory (Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau) from the perspective of existential security and sovereign power. Countering Carl Schmitt's influential notion of the autonomy of the political, Bates demonstrates that Enlightenment thinkers understood the autonomous political sphere as a space of law protecting individuals according to their political status, not as mere members of a historically contingent social order. (shrink)

Possibly the most fundamental scientific problem is the origin of time and causality. The inherent difficulty is that all scientific theories of origins and evolution consider the existence of time and causality as given. We tackle this problem by starting from the concept of self-organization, which is seen as the spontaneous emergence of order out of primordial chaos. Self-organization can be explained by the selective retention of invariant or consistent variations, implying a breaking of the initial symmetry (...) exhibited by randomness. In the case of time, we start from a random graph connecting primitive “events”. Selection on the basis of consistency eliminates cyclic parts of the graph, so that transitive closure can transform it into a partial order relation of precedence. Causality is assumed to be carried by causal “agents” which undergo a more traditional variation and selection, giving rise to causal laws that are partly contingent, partly necessary. (shrink)

Né dans le sillage d’un « significant renewal of interest in Bergsonism and a greater recognition of his influence on twentieth-century philosophy » (p. 1), ce livre ne pouvait que poser des questions sur le temps, ramenant également à la philosophie de Heidegger, à qui l’on doit l’une des pensées les plus originales à ce sujet. Aussi Heath Massey s’emploie-t-il lire les textes de Bergson qui tentent de repenser la notion traditionnelle de temps à côté de ceux de Heidegger, mettant (...) plus particulièrement en lumière l’influence de celui-là sur celui-ci, une influence largement passée inaperçue. L’importance de cette œuvre tient dans la façon dont l’A. conteste la philosophie du temps que Heidegger attribue à Bergson. Notre guide considère la lecture bergsonienne de Heidegger comme une « oversimplication » (p. 84) et vise à éclaircir comment, malgré les propos du penseur allemand, le philosophe français a été capable de radicalement repenser le temps d’un point de vue ontologique. Dès lors, l’ouvrage s’achève sur un goût de soupçon, celui-ci faisant dire que Heidegger a essayé de se distinguer de Bergson pour ne pas admettre ce dont il lui est redevable. (shrink)

Why did Greek philosophy begin in the sixth century BCE? Why did Indian philosophy begin at about the same time? Why did the earliest philosophy take the form that it did? Why was this form so similar in Greece and India? And how do we explain the differences between them? These questions can only be answered by locating the philosophical intellect within its entire societal context, ignoring neither ritual nor economy. The cities of Greece and northern India were in (...) this period distinctive also by virtue of being pervasively monetised. The metaphysics of both cultures is marked by the projection and the introjection of the abstract, all-pervasive, quasi-omnipotent, impersonal substance embodied in money. And in both cultures this development accompanied the interiorisation of the cosmic rite of passage. (shrink)

Much of the history of physics at the beginning of the twentieth century has been written with a sharp focus on a few key figures and a handful of notable events. Einstein’s Generation offers a distinctive new approach to the origins of modern physics by exploring both the material culture that stimulated relativity and the reaction of Einstein’s colleagues to his pioneering work. Richard Staley weaves together the diverse strands of experimental and theoretical physics, commercial instrument making, and the sociology (...) of physics around 1900 to present a complete view of the collective efforts of a group whose work helped set the stage for Einstein’s revolutionary theories and the transition from classical to modern physics that followed. Collecting papers, talks, catalogues, conferences, and correspondence, Staley juxtaposes scientists’ views of relativity at the time to modern understandings of its history. Ultimately, Einstein’s Generation tells the story of a group of individuals whose work engendered some of the most significant advances of the twentieth century—and challenges our celebration of Einstein’s era above all others. (shrink)

"A gem of enlightenment.... One rejoices in Bronowski's dedication to the identity of acts of creativity and of imagination, whether in Blake or Yeats or Einstein or Heisenberg."--Kirkus Reviews "According to Bronowski, our account of the world is dictated by our biology: how we perceive, imagine, symbolize, etc. He proposes to explain how we receive and translate our experience of the world so that we achieve knowledge. He examines the mechanisms of our perception; the origin and nature of natural (...) language; formal systems and scientific discourse; and how science, as a systematic attempt to establish closed systems one after another, progresses by exploring its own errors and new but unforeseen connections.... A delightful look at the inquiring mind."--Library Journal "Eminently enjoyable to read, with a good story or 'bon mot' on every page."--Nature "A well-written and brilliantly presented defense of the scientific enterprise which could be especially valuable to scientists and to teachers of science at all levels."--AAAS Science Books & Films Contents 1. The Mind as an Instrument for Understanding 2. The Evolution and Power of Symbolic Language 3. Knowledge as Algorithm and as Metaphor 4. The Laws of Nature and the Nature of Laws 5. Error, Progress, and the Concept of Time 6. Law and Individual Responsibility. (shrink)

The development of Christian thought on Heidegger can not be ignored. Heidegger was born in a conservative Catholic family, he entered college was originally a theological student. Even after he was formally separated from the Catholic system, he also regarded as a Christian theologian since. Until 1935, he was also born in the beliefs of his distress. This paper will focus on "Being and Time," presented by the theme of Christianity, Christianity is still trying to point out many of (...) his early ideas the source of important concepts. The influence of Christianity on the intellectual development of Heidegger can hardly be exaggerated. Heidegger was born in a conservative Catholic family. He first entered university as a student of theology. Even after his formal break with the system of Catholicism, he still considered himself a Christian theologian, and as late as 1935, he still had to struggle with the faith of his birth. The theme of this treatise is the Christian influence on Heidegger as it is displayed in Being and Time. It aims at showing that many important concepts in this opus magnum of Heidegger have their origin in Christian thought. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: First Origins: Visual Space The Space Common to Vision and Touch, the Time Common to All the Senses Association by Cause and Effect: A World in Mind Sense‐Divide Transcendent Space and Time References Further Reading.

The origin of paraconsistent logic is closely related with the argument, ‘from the assertion of two mutually contradictory statements any other statement can be deduced’; this can be referred to as ex contradictione sequitur quodlibet (ECSQ). Despite its medieval origin, only by the 1930s did it become the main reason for the unfeasibility of having contradictions in a deductive system. The purpose of this article is to study what happened earlier: from Principia Mathematica to that time, when (...) it became well established. The two main historical claims that I am going to advance are the following: (1) the first explicit use of ECSQ as the main argument for supporting the necessity of excluding any contradiction from deductive systems is to be found in the first edition of the book Grundzüge der Theoretischen Logik (Hilbert, D. and Ackermann, W. 1928. Grundzüge der Theoretischen Logik. Berlin: Julius Springer Verlag); (2) Łukasiewicz's position regarding the logical constraints against contradictions varies considerably from his studies on the principle of (non-) contradiction in Aristotle, published in 1910 and what is stated in his `authorized lectured notes' on mathematical logic that appeared in 1929. The two texts are: 1) a paper in German (Łukasiewicz, J. 1910. `Über den Satz des Widerspruchs bei Aristotles'. Bulletin International de l'Académie des sciences de Cracovie, Classe d'Histoire et de Philosophie, pp. 15–38) [English translation: Łukasiewicz, J. 1971. ‘On the principle of contradiction in Aristotle’, Review of Metaphysics, XXIV, 485–509]; and 2) a book in Polish. Łukasiewicz, J. 1910. O zasadzie sprzecznosci u Aristotelesa Studium krytyczne, Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe [German translation: Łukasiewicz, J. 1993. Über den Satz des Widerspruchs bei Aristotles. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag]. The lecture notes were then published as a book (Łukasiewicz, J. 1958. Elementy Logiki Matematycznej. Warszawa: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe [PWN] and then translated into English (Łukasiewicz, J. 1963. Elements of Mathematical Logic. Oxford, New York: Pergamon Press/the Macmillan Company). The second half of this article will concentrate on Łukasiewicz's position on ECSQ. This will lead me to propose that to regard him as a forerunner of paraconsistent logic by virtue of those early writings is accurate only if his book published in Polish is considered but not if the analysis is restricted to the paper originally published in German (as has been the case for the principal reconstructions of the history of paraconsistent logic). Furthermore, I will stress that in the 1929 book he presented one formalization of ECSQ as an axiom for sentential calculus and, also, he used ECSQ to defend the necessity of consistency, apparently independently of Hilbert and Ackermann's book. At the end, I will suggest that the aim of twentieth century usage of ECSQ was to change from the centuries-long philosophical discussion about contradictions to a more ‘technical’ one. But with paraconsistent logic viewed as a technical solution to this restriction, then, the philosophical problem revives but having now at one's disposal an improved understanding of it. Finally, Łukasiewicz's two different positions about ECSQ open an interesting question about the history of paraconsistent logic: do we have to attempt a consistent reconstruction of it, or are we prepared to admit inconsistencies within it? (shrink)

This book provides an account of the unity of Immanuel Kant’s early metaphysics, including the moment he invents transcendental idealism. Matthew Rukgaber argues that a division between “two worlds”—the world of matter, force, and space on the one hand, and the world of metaphysical substances with inner states and principles preserved by God on the other—is what guides Kant’s thought. Until 1770 Kant consistently held a conception of space as a force-based material product of monads that are only virtually present (...) in nature. As Rukgaber explains, transcendental idealism emerges as a constructivist metaphysics, a view in which space and time are real relations outside of the mind, but those relations are metaphysically dependent on the subject. The subject creates the simple “now” and “here,” thus introducing into the intrinsically indeterminate and infinitely divisible continua of nature a metric with transformation rules that make possible all individuation and measurement. (shrink)