PERSISTENCE and SPACETIME - Couverture souple

Balashov, Yuri

 
9780199679652: PERSISTENCE and SPACETIME

Synopsis

Material objects persist through time and survive change. How do they manage to do so? What are the underlying facts of persistence? Do objects persist by being "wholly present" at all moments of time at which they exist? Or do they persist by having distinct "temporal segments" confined to the corresponding times? Are objects three-dimensional entities extended in space, but not in time? Or are they four-dimensional spacetime "worms"? These are matters of intense debate, which is now driven by concerns about two major issues in fundamental ontology: parthood and location. It is in this context that broadly empirical considerations are increasingly brought to bear on the debate about persistence.
Persistence and Spacetime pursues this empirically based approach to the questions. Yuri Balashov begins by setting out major rival views of persistence -- endurance, perdurance, and exdurance -- in a spacetime framework and proceeds to investigate the implications of Einstein's theory of relativity for the debate about persistence. His overall conclusion -- that relativistic considerations favour four-dimensionalism over three-dimensionalism -- is hardly surprising. It is, however, anything but trivial. Contrary to a common misconception, there is no straightforward argument from relativity to four-dimensionalism. The issues involved are complex, and the debate is closely entangled with a number of other philosophical disputes, including those about the nature and ontology of time, parts and wholes, material constitution, causation and properties, and vagueness.

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À propos de l?auteur

Yuri Balashov is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Georgia, US. His current interests are in analytic ontology and philosophy of time. He has published extensively in major philosophy journals, such as Noûs, Philosophical Studies, American Philosophical Quarterly, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Quarterly, The Monist, and British Journal for the Philosophy of Science and is a co-editor of Einstein Studies in Russia (Birkhäuser, 2002) and Philosophy of Science: Contemporary Readings (Routledge, 2002).





Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Autres éditions populaires du même titre

9780199579921: Persistence and Spacetime

Edition présentée

ISBN 10 :  019957992X ISBN 13 :  9780199579921
Editeur : Oxford University Press, 2010
Couverture rigide