User:LillyBoop/Sandbox

Stereotypical representation of the passage of time.

Although J.M.E. McTaggart and Henri Bergson both believed that time is observed in the passing of events, McTaggart’s arguments for the unreality of time prove more convincing than Bergson’s due to Bergson’s belief in time as heterogeneous in composition, subjective in nature, and indivisible structure.

Henri Bergson

19th century French Philosopher Henri Bergson, once widely recognized and respected throughout France although he has now fallen from the public eye. Best know for his essays Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience), published as his doctoral thesis in 1889 and Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire: Essai sur la relation du corps a l'ésprit) published 1896, Henri Bergson has published many other works including An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) and Creative Evolution (1932).

Duration

Henri Bergson believed intuit, non-mechanical time to be in the form of Dureé or Duration. In this view, time is pure motion and mobility, indivisible and unquantifiable-- unrepresentable in its entirety by any stationary method. He chose to ignore the time of science and mathematics and explore the flexibility and indivisibility of time as experienced by the mind.

Heterogeneous Composition

Time, as Duration, was thought by Bergson to be heterogeneous in composition as no two events are the same yet they are all part of the same whole. He expands on this by saying that this composition is the result of time being a qualitative multiplicity meaning it is made up of many individual units which are distinguishable from one another only by their defining characteristics (rendering it heterogeneous) and not their location in space.

Subjective Nature

The movement of the ribbon in this tape is representative of Duration as explained in Bergon's two-spool analogy.

To be intuit, Bergson also believed Duration to be a subjective perspective of time. He uses the example of two spools of yarn to illustrate how as one unravels and the other rolls up the thread, Duration is like the continual flow of aging as one's future decreases along side of the accumulation of memories in one's mind. Bergson believed that consciousness was equal to memory, meaning that how you interpret and view an event was affected by your past experiences and that no two moments could ever be identical as you would always have within it the memory of your first experience.

Indivisibility

As he believed it to be pure motion or mobility, Bergson's Duration is indivisible. He best describes this property of time in his work An Introduction to Metaphysics by stating how the scientific or mathematical interpretation of Duration was itself divisible but Duration itself--as an act of the mind-- was not.

J.M.E. McTaggart

A prominent Hegelian scholar, nineteenth-century philosopher John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart is best known for his short publication The Unreality of Time in which he argues that our perception of time is an illusion and that time itself is merely an ideal. It is often considered one of the most important papers ever written on the philosophy of time.

three Series

In his paper, McTaggart divided the passage of time into three separate series, which he named the A-Series, B-Series, and C-Series. The former describes the passage of events from future to present to past, explaining how every moment will at some point be each of those instances. The latter focuses on the order of events void of a temporal component and the middle group is a combination of the other two: containing both a temporal and ordered component, dividing moments in time into before, after and simultaneously [with regards to the event in question].

Quantitative Multiplicity

Because of how he divided up time into different series using the same criteria for each unit and based his series constant order (juxtaposition) McTaggart's series of time as A- B- and C- series can be described as a quantitative multiplicity.

Objectivity

McTaggart's B-series, based on events being before, after, or at the same time as one another is described in his work as being objective because although the beginning and end of an event is subjective, the order is not. When using the alphabet as an example, the letter N always comes before O but after M.

Divisible Nature

It is clear that McTaggart believed time to be divisible, as he based his arguments themselves on time being divided into three series. His first series classified events as being in the past, present or future; his B-Series divided events into before, after and simultaneously while C-Series events are based purely upon the division and order of time.

Glossary

• A-Series: The first of J.M.E. McTaggart’s methods for describing the relationship between moments in time, highlights the change of events from past to present to future and how each event contains all three of these instances.

• B-Series: The second of J.M.E. McTaggart’s methods for describing relationships between moments in time, focuses on the order of events i.e. whether an event happens before, after or at the same of as the event in question. It is a combination of both the A- and C- Series.

• C-Series: The third of J.M.E. McTaggart’s series, void of a temporal component, it focuses solely on the order of events, rather than their passage.

• Duration: Henri Bergson’s view of time, an infinitely indivisible qualitative multiplicity which he describes as pure motion or mobility which is subjective in nature and exists only in the mind of the observer.

• Heterogeneous: Consisting of dissimilar or diverse ingredients or constituents.

• Homogeneous: Of the same or a similar kind or nature or, of uniform structure or composition throughout.

• Juxtaposition: The act or an instance of placing two or more things side by side; also : the state of being so placed.

• Qualitative Multiplicity: As defined by Henri Bergson, a group of individual objects which all have identical properties—such as shape, size, etc.—distinguishable only from one another by their position in space that can be easily quantified.

• Quantitative Multiplicity: As defined by Henri Bergson, a group of individual objects that cannot be differentiated based on their location in space but each unit must be identified by its unique properties.

• Time: The measured or measurable period during which an action, process, or condition exists or continues. A nonspatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future. The point or period when something occurs.

Credits

Page created by LillyBoop (talk) (Actual page URL: http://en.wikipedoa.org/wiki/User:LillyBoop/Sandbox)