Question

PHILOSOPHY: if you were an empiricist how would you go about describing time and space? I have to write an essay on it one page in length

Answer 1

Philosophy of space and time is the branch of philosophy concerned with the issues surrounding the ontology, epistemology, and character of space and time. While such ideas have been central to philosophy from its inception, the philosophy of space and time was both an inspiration for and a central aspect of early analytic philosophy. The subject focuses on a number of basic issues, including whether time and space exist independently of the mind, whether they exist independently of one another, what accounts for time's apparently unidirectional flow, whether times other than the present moment exist, and questions about the nature of identity.

Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason, one of the most influential works in the history of the philosophy of space and time. He describes time as an a priori notion that, together with other a priori notions such as space, allows us to comprehend sense experience. Kant holds that neither space nor time are substance, entities in themselves, or learned by experience; he holds, rather, that both are elements of a systematic framework we use to structure our experience. Spatial measurements are used to quantify how far apart objects are, and temporal measurements are used to quantitatively compare the interval between (or duration of) events. Although space and time are held to be transcendentally ideal in this sense, they are also empirically real—that is, not mere illusions.

Eternalism is a philosophical approach to the ontological nature of time, which takes the view that all existence in time is equally real, as opposed to presentism or the growing block universe theory of time, in which at least the future is not the same as any other time.Space is not something objective and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; instead, it is subjective and ideal, and originates from the mind’s nature in accord with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally.

Two exactly opposite views of the universe represented by space, time, matter and motion are discussed. Historically, theruling and dominant view based on causality insists on a finite universe that came into being at a single instant and as asingle act of creation in the finite past. The universe (and life) manifests itself in a more or less deterministic way accordingto the parameters set at the beginning of creation.The opposite view based on chance and necessity of dialectics and quantum dynamics, posits an universe infinite inspace and eternal in time, where matter and motion comes into being and passes out of existence as an unceasingquantum process and evolve through dialectical negation of the negation.

The developments in physics, cosmology, and metaphysics so far have led to the enrichment of the content of the debateand few reversals of the notion of space-time-matter- motion; but a clear understanding of the inner dynamics and the real nature of these four elements remain as elusive as ever. The discovery of the quantum phenomena has only made the situation more complex and far more confusing.

Looking through the subjective idealism of Immanuel Kant; space and time are illusory - mere projections of the humanmind; within which unknowable things-in-themselves and the subjective mind thrive.Looking through the mathematical idealism of Albert Einstein; an integrated four-dimensional spacetime manifold is the objective reality and the new ether in a finite universe created in the finite past; through which the force of gravity and light propagate and where matter and motion are only secondary and incidental.

The concept of space and time. All material bodies have a certain extension: length, breadth, height. They are variously placed in relation to each other and constitute parts of one or another system. Space is a form of coordination of coexisting objects and states of matter. It consists in the fact that objects are extraposed to one another and have certain quantitative relationships. The order of coexistence of these objects and their states forms the structure of space.Space and time are universal forms of the existence of matter, the coordination of objects. The universality of these forms lies in the fact that they are forms of existence of all the objects and processes that have ever existed or will exist in the infinite universe. Not only the events of the external world, but also all feelings and thoughts take place in space and time. In the material world everything has extension and duration. Space and time have their peculiarities. Space has three dimensions: length, breadth and height, but time has only one from the past through the present to the future. It is inevitable, unrepeatable and irreversible.Space and time exist objectively. Although we may feel how time in its inexorable passage is carrying us away, we can neither halt nor prolong it. We cannot recover a single moment of existence. The flow of time is beyond our control.

The philosophy of space and time is more intimately connected with the nature of psychical theory than any other branch of philosophy. Among the more philosophical questions are :

• whether it is proper to treat space and time as real things
• whether it is possible that there should exist empty space and eventless time
• whether our conception of our world as spatially and temporally extended beyond us is a function of an a priori scheme we impose on a reality rather than of reality itself
• whether it is proper to think in terms of time flowing, or of the present exietence of past events
• whether the asymmetry between past and future is logically inviolate or only contingently so.

Space and time as real things, containers of infinite extension or duration within the whole succeesion of natural events in the world has a definite position. Similarly, things may really be at rest or really moving, and this will not simply be a matter of their relationship to other objects changing.

A “philosophy of space and time” It seems obvious that any serious study of the nature of space and time, and of our knowledge of them, must raise questions of metaphysics and epistemology. It also seems obvious that we should expect to gain some insight into those questions from physics, which does take the structure of space and time, both on small and on cosmic scales, as an essential part of its domain. But this has not always seemed so obvious. That physics has an illuminating, even authoritative, perspective on these matters was not automatically conceded by philosophy, as if in recognition of some inherent right. No more did physics simply acquire that authority as a result of its undoubted empirical success.

Rather, the authority came to physics because physicists – over several centuries, in concert with mathematicians and philosophers – engaged in a profound philosophical project: to understand how concepts of space and time function in physics, and how these concepts are connected with ordinary spatial and temporal measurement. Indeed, the empirical success of physics was itself made possible, in some part, by the achievements of that philosophical effort, in defining spatio-temporal concepts in empirically meaningful ways, often in defiance of the prevailing philosophical understanding of those concepts. In other words, the physics of space and time has not earned its place in philosophy by suggesting empirical answers to standing philosophical questions about space and time. Instead, it has succeeded in redefining the questions themselves in its own empirical terms. The struggle to articulate these definitions, and to re-assess and revise them in the face of changing empirical circumstances, is the history of the philosophy of space and time from Newton to Einstein.

The revival of metaphysical debate on space and time, over the past several decades, must be understood as part of the general reaction against logical positivism in the late twentieth century. The positivist view was that debate had been largely settled by Einstein: clear-sighted philosophers had always grasped the relativity of space, time, and motion on epistemological grounds, and Einstein finally brought their insight to fruition in a physical theory. From the more recent literature on the absolute relational controversy, by contrast, we get a more vivid and realistic picture of the interaction between physics and philosophy, especially of the diverse ways in which purely philosophical convictions have motivated some of the most revolutionary work in physics. And we see, moreover, how sometimes the philosophical aims of physicists have been unrealized ,how much divergence there has been between the original philosophical motivations behind revolutionary theories, and the content and structure of the theories that were eventually produced.

The most familiar example :and the most damning to the positivists’ neat picture – is the divergence between Einstein’s vision of a theory of “the relativity of all motion” and general relativity itself, which turned out to have similarities with Newton’s theory of absolute space that Einstein found philosophically hard to accept. In such cases there can be no doubt of the tremendous heuristic power of the original philosophical ideas, yet they can give rise to theories that seem to contradict them.