Is “one second per second” a Plausible Answer to the Question of “how fast does time pass? ”: A Reply to Bradford Skow

Document Type : Research/Original/Reqular Article

Author

Department of Philosophy of Science, Sharif university of technology, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Contrary to Skow’s point of view, I will argue that “one second per second” is not a plausible answer to the question of “how fast does time pass? ”. In the first part, I argue that the interpretation that Skow offered in order that one can show in which the second premise of “the rate of passage argument” is false, is not a different interpretation in such a way that he claimed. I will show that either two interpretations he mentioned are identical or even though they are different from each other, in each case “one second per second” is one second divided by one second. So all of the premises of the argument are true in each interpretation, and then the argument is sound. In the second part, I introduce a new argument against the “one second per second” reply. I argue that this reply has nothing to say about the real world in the sense that the rate of the passage of time would be one second per second even though time actually does not pass because this answer is a tautology. So believers in objective becoming, including Skow, should find another reply to the question concerning the rate of the passage of time

Keywords

References

شهشهانی، سیاوش. (1388ش). حساب دیفرانسیل و انتگرال. جلد اول. تهران: انتشارات فاطمی.
Mazzola, Claudio. (2016). “One Second per Second Multiplied by One Second.” European Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 12 (1), pp. 63-75.
Olson, Eric T. (2009). “The Rate of Time’s Passage.” Analysis, 69 (1), pp. 3-9.
Phillips, Ian. (2009). “Rate Abuse: A Reply to Olson.” Analysis, 69 (3), pp. 503-505.
Prosser, Simon. (2013). “The Passage of Time.” in Dyke and Bardon (Eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Time. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 315-327.
Skow, Bradford. (2011). “On the Meaning of the Question “How Fast Does Time Pass?” Philosophical Studies, 155, pp. 325-344.
Skow, Bradford. (2012). “One Second per Second.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 85(2), pp. 377-389
Journal for the History of Science
Volume 16, Issue 2 - Serial Number 25
September 2019
Pages 247-257

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics