PHI 124: Philosophy of Space and Time

PHI 124: Philosophy of Space and Time

(10 credits: half module)

Stephen Makin

Autumn Semester 2010-2011

Course Information

Contents

Information on unfair meansp.3

Course details p.4

Lecture topicsp.5

Tutorialsp.6

Tutorial and micro-essay topicsp.9

Reading (resources)p.12

Reading (topic by topic)p.13

Important Information on the Use of Unfair Means in Assessment

It is extremely important that you are aware of what counts as Unfair Means (Plagiarism) in assessed work, and that you are aware of the serious consequences of using unfair means in your work.

The following four examples of unfair means are serious academic offences and may result in penalties that could have a lasting effect on a student´s career, both at University and beyond (including possible expulsion from the University).

Plagiarism (either intentional or unintentional) is the stealing of ideas or work of another person (including experts and fellow or former students) and is considered dishonest and unprofessional. Plagiarism may take the form of cutting and pasting, taking or closely paraphrasing ideas, passages, sections, sentences, paragraphs, drawings, graphs and other graphical material from books, articles, internet sites or any other source and submitting them for assessment without appropriate acknowledgement.

Submitting bought or commissioned work (for example from internet sites, essay “banks” or “mills”) is an extremely serious form of plagiarism. This may take the form of buying or commissioning either the whole assignment or part of it and implies a clear intention to deceive the examiners. The University also takes an extremely serious view of any student who sells, offers to sell or passes on their own assignments to other students.

Double submission (or self plagiarism) is resubmitting previously submitted work on one or more occasions (without proper acknowledgement). This may take the form of copying either the whole assignment or part of it. Normally credit will already have been given for this work.

Collusion is where two or more people work together to produce a piece of work, all or part of which is then submitted by each of them as their own individual work. This includes passing on work in any format to another student. Collusion does not occur where students involved in group work are encouraged to work together to produce a single piece of work as part of the assessment process.

Course Details

Lecturer:Steve Makin

Email:

Tel: 0114 222 0573

Office: Room C05, Department of Philosophy, 45 Victoria Street.

Office hours: Fridays 11.00-1.00

Lectures:Tuesday 10.00-10.50

VenueIn week 1 we will be in St George’s LT 3 (access via Mappin Hall on Mappin Street)

From week 2 we will be meeting in the Chemistry Building LT 1

Please take note of this change of venue from week 2

Tutorials:4 tutorials in weeks 4, 6, 8, 10

Reading week:Week 7 of the Autumn Semester (8-12 November 2010) is a reading week. There will be no lectures or discussion seminars in the department that week.

Course outline:This course will cover some introductory philosophical problems concerning space and time. We will start by looking at the ancient paradoxes about motion due to Zeno of Elea. This will lead on to questions about the structure of space and time (are they continuous or atomic? must time have a beginning?); the relations between time and change (does time require change?); the flow of time (is there a real distinction between past, present and future?); knowledge of the future (is knowledge of the future consistent with freedom of action?); truths about the future (are there already truths about the future?) ; and our access to the past (could we travel into or otherwise affect the past?).

Lecture topics

Lectures 1-3:Zeno’s paradoxes of motion: the Dichotomy, the Moving Rows and the Arrow

Lecture 4The beginning of time

Lecture 5 Time without change: substantival and relational theories of time

Lecture 6Tensed and detensed views of time (part 1)

Lecture 7Tensed and detensed views of time (part 2)

Lecture 8Foreknowledge and the open future (part 1)

Lecture 9Foreknowledge and the open future (part 2)

Lecture 10Future truth and the open future

Lecture 11Time travel and affecting the past

Tutorials

In addition to the lectures for PHI 124 there are also tutorials. A tutorial is a small, discussion-oriented meeting (run by a tutor, rather than a lecturer).

You must sign up to a tutorial group (since it is your tutor who grades your work; and if your work is not graded then you will not receive credit for the module), and you are required to attend those meetings.

If, for some reason, you need to miss a tutorial meeting, please contact your tutor or the Director of 1st Year Studies.

How do I Join a Tutorial Group?

You should register for a tutorial group which fits in with the rest of your timetable.

You register for PHI 124 tutorials via MOLE (My Online Learning Environment) on or after the Monday of week 2 of the semester (Monday 4 October)

To choose a group, log into MOLE, which you can reach through MUSE (My University of Sheffield Environment).

Click on the PHI 124 module and then on the icon which says ‘PHI124 Tutorial Sign Up’. You can then choose your group and time from those listed.

There is a wide range of times available and students join groups on a first-come-first-served basis. So, to maximise your choice of sessions, you should register as soon as possible after registration opens at 10am on the Monday of week 2.

If you are unable to make any of the sessions listed, please contact the Departmental Office, or the Director of 1st Year Studies (Chris Bennett: email ).

Tutorial Topics

You will find prepared tutorial topicsfor PHI 124 in this booklet. They provide subjects for tutorial discussion which fit in with the lectures, combined with associated questions for discussion.

NOTE: In advance of your first tutorial (week 4 = week starting 18 October) you should prepare the first tutorial topic for that tutorial.

We hope you will find philosophy tutorials enjoyable and will get a lot out of them. Of course, this also means that you will have to make a positive contribution to the proceedings. While normal practice will be to rely on the prepared range of Tutorial Topics, you can also take the initiative by asking for discussion of specific topics, problems, or anything that puzzled or intrigued you in lectures.

Discussion in tutorials is one of the most important ways in which you can develop your feeling and expertise for philosophical debate. The main rules for successful and profitable tutorial meetings are:

Don’t be afraid to say something;
Put in the necessary background work;
Respect other people’s opinions.

Assessment

PHI 124 is a ten credit half module.

Your initial mark for the module is fixed by an unseen final examination (1 question, 1 hour), which will be scheduled for the exam period in weeks 13-15 (Monday 17 January – Saturday 5 February 2011)

Your final mark for the module is 100% of this initial mark, so long as you submit and pass all three of your micro-essays during the semester. However each late, failed or missing micro-essay will result in the deduction of 10 marks from your initial (exam question) mark

This means that you could lose 30 marks if you don’t do the micro-essays set for this module

A re-assuring note: you will pass a micro-essay as long as it is a reasonable attempt to address the topic set.

Micro-Essays

After your first tutorial meeting, your discussions will be based around micro-essays (300 words) that you should write in advance of each tutorial, on a topic set by the lecturer (for details see below). These micro-essays are focused on asking you to learn how to do some of the things you will be expected to do in Levels Two and Three:

extracting arguments from complex texts;
explaining issues in your own words;
expressing your own considered opinion about an issue;
making an argument or thinking up a counterexample;
thinking about the “other side” of an argument;
presenting an issue orally;
and above all, writing clearly.

Although these micro-essays are not given a mark individually, the submission of these micro-essays does count towards your mark for the module, as explained above.

You can receive either a pass or a fail on these micro-essays. You will be given a pass as long as the micro-essay is handed in on time (that is, before the tutorial) and is of reasonable quality.

Since you are required to write a micro-essay for each tutorial after the first (week 4), and since there are four tutorials for a half-module such as PHI 124, you will be required to write THREE micro-essays for PHI 124 (for tutorials in weeks 6, 8 and 10)

For further information about level one tutorials and assessment you can visit the following page on our Departmental website

Tutorial and micro-essay topics

Tutorial 1 (week 4)

Zeno’s Paradoxes

Read carefully the following three passages from Aristotle

[Zeno’s Dichotomy argument] asserts the non-existence of motion in the ground that that which is in locomotion must arrive at the half way stage before it reaches the goal.

(Aristotle Physics 6.9, 239b11-13)

Zeno’s argument makes a false assumption in asserting that it is impossible for a thing to pass over or come in contact with infinite things individually in a finite time. For there are two senses in which length and time and generally anything continuous are called ‘infinite’: they are called so either in respect of divisibility or in respect of their extremities. So while a thing in a finite time cannot come in contact with things quantitatively infinite, it can come in contact with things infinite in respect of divisibility: for in this sense the time itself is also infinite; and so we find that the time occupied by the passage over the infinite is not a finite but an infinite time, and the contact with the infinites is made in times not finite but infinite in number

(Aristotle Physics 6.2, 233a21-31)

But although this solution is an adequate reply to the questioner (for the question was whether it is possible to traverse or count infinite things in a finite time), it is inadequate to the facts and the truth. For suppose the distance to be left out of account and the question asked to be no longer whether it is possible in a finite time to traverse an infinite number of distances, and suppose that the inquiry is made to refer to the time itself (for the time contains an infinite number of divisions): then this solution will no longer be adequate...... So when someone asks the question whether it is possible to traverse infinite things - either in time or in distance - we must reply that in a way it is but in a way it is not. For if they exist actually it is not possible, but if potentially, it is; for someone in continuous movement has traversed infinite things incidentally, not without qualification; for it is incidental to the line to be infinitely many halves, but its essence and being are different.

(Aristotle Physics 8.8, 263a15-22, 263b3-9)

Issues for discussion

Can you explain the difference between viewing space and time as continuous and viewing space and time as atomistic?

As clearly and briefly as you can, state first Zeno’s Dichotomy argument and second one other argument (as short as you like) that you can find in any of the passages from Aristotle quoted above.

An atomistic view of space and time (ie spatio-temporal atomism) would provide a response to Zeno’s dichotomy argument. Can you explain how? And do you think that we should therefore adopt an atomistic view of space and time?

Some scholars think that Zeno’s Moving Rows argument is an objection to an atomistic theory of space and time. Can you explain what the Moving Rows argument is, and why it might cause difficulties for spatio-temporal atomism?

How might you respond to Zeno’s Dichotomy argument without adopting an atomistic view of space and time?

Tutorial 2 (week 6): Micro-essay topic.

Time without change

Consider then the following world. To the best of the knowledge of the inhabitants of this world all of its matter is contained in three relatively small regions, which I shall call A, B and C... Periodically there is observed to occur in this world a phenomenon which I shall call a ‘local freeze’. During a local freeze all processes occurring in one of the three regions come to a complete halt; there is no motion, no growth, no decay, and so on. At least this is how it appears to observers in the other regions... But now the following seems possible. We can imagine first that the inhabitants of this world discover, by the use of clocks located in unfrozen regions, that local freezes always last the same amount of time - let us suppose that the length of freezes is always exactly one year. We can also imagine that they keep records of local freezes and find that they occur at regular intervals - let us suppose that it is found that in region A local freezes have occurred every third year, that in region B local freezes have occurred every fourth year, and that in region C local freezes have occurred every fifth year. Having noticed this they could easily calculate that, given these frequencies, there should be simultaneous local freezes in regions A and B every twelfth year, in regions A and C every fifteenth year, in regions B and C every twentieth year, and in all three regions every sixtieth year. Since these three regions exhaust their universe, to say that there will be simultaneous local freezes in all three regions every sixtieth year is to say that every sixtieth year there will be a total freeze lasting one year. Let us suppose that the predicted simultaneous two-region freezes are observed to occur as scheduled (the observers being, in each case, the inhabitants of whichever region remains unfrozen), that no freeze is observed to begin by anyone at the time at which local freezes are scheduled to begin simultaneously in all three regions, and that the subsequent pattern of freezes is found to be in accord with the original generalization about the frequency of freezes. If all of this happened, I submit, the inhabitants of this world would have grounds for believing that there are intervals during which no changes occur anywhere

(from Sydney Shoemaker Time Without Change: available in the electronic coursepack)

Micro-essay. Briefly explain the difference between a substantival and a relational view of time. Why would it be relevant to deciding between those two views of time to consider whether there could be periods of time in which absolutely nothing happens?

Issues for further discussion

In what way is the strange example discussed by Shoemaker relevant to making up your mind on the question of whether there could be periods of time in which absolutely nothing happens? (After all, our world is nothing like the one Shoemaker describes).

Can you think of considerations other than those concerning time without change which might be relevant to deciding between a substantival and a relational view of time?

Tutorial 3 (week 8): Micro-essay topic.

Tensed and detensed views of time

Micro-essay. Tenses and dates are two types of temporal property. What is the difference between them? And how does that difference underlie the distinction between tensed and detensed views of time?

Issues for further discussion

What is meant by the claim that there are modal differences between the past and future?

Some philosophers have claimed that any tensed sentence can be restated in tenseless terms. Can you illustrate this claim by means of an example? Do you think it is a persuasive claim?

Why might someone hold that human beings need tensed beliefs in order to engage successfully in courses of action (eg in order to succeed in turning up to your lectures on time)?

Do you think that a tenseless view of time makes time and space look more similar to one another than they really are?

“It must be possible (in principle) to provide an observer independent description of what is real”. Using examples, can you explain why someone might find that claim plausible. How is the claim relevant to the debate about tensed and tenseless views of time?

Tutorial 4 (week 10): Micro-essay topic

Foreknowledge and the open future

Micro-essay. “If there exists a god who knows in advance every detail of what you will do in the future then you have no freedom of choice about what to do in the future”. Explain as clearly as you can the argument expressed in that claim.

Issues for further discussion

Do you think the argument that you have just explained is a convincing argument.

Put the issue of divine foreknowledge to one side. Do you think that you could know something about someone else’s future? Can you give examples which would make a positive answer to that question (ie “yes, I could”) plausible.

Do you agree that if you (ie an ordinary human being) could know about someone else’s future then their freedom of choice for the future would be limited?