Review Reviewed Work(s): The New Aspects of Time. Its Continuity and Novelties. Selected Papers in the Philosophy of Science by Milič Čapek and Robert S. Cohen Review by: Gary Mar Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Mar., 1992), pp. 604-607 Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20129221 Accessed: 08-10-2017 15:11 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Philosophy Education Society Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Review of Metaphysics This content downloaded from 130.166.3.5 on Sun, 08 Oct 2017 15:11:38 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 604 MATTHEW CUDDEBACK AND STAFF thesis). The final section briefly sketches some historical figures' in terpretation of the first Critique and indicates how the present work relates to them. But Brandt's most important achievement is clearly the sophisticated and detailed development of an entirely new and innovative interpretation of Kant's table of judgments.?Eric Watkins, University of Notre Dame. Capek, Milic. The New Aspects of Time. Its Continuity and Novelties. Selected Papers in the Philosophy of Science. Edited by Robert S. Cohen. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 125. Dor drecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. xx + 348 pp. $94.00? In his vigorous defense of the reality of time, Capek champions a tradition of process philosophy that includes such figures as Bergson, James, and Whitehead, against both philosophers and physicists that subordinate time to some lower status in reality or regard it as a peculiar dimension of space. This is, in fact, the point of his last essay in this volume, "Time-Space Rather than Space-Time," where he argues, contrary to standard interpretations, that relativity physics does not necessitate a frozen "block universe" that includes preexisting future events. This collection of essays falls into three parts: (1) The Problems of Time in Psychology; (2) Matter, Causation and Time; and (3) The Status of Time in the Relativistic Physics. The essays include work from the period 1950-1984. In all three parts, Capek's central aim is to explain time in a manner that is consistent with the findings of the introspective approach to psychology found in James, Bergson, and Gestalt theorists, and with the breakthroughs of relativity physics and quantum mechanics. This is set against the Newtonian concept of time as a homogeneous, mathematical continuum consisting of du rationless instants. Throughout several of these essays one finds a distinction between what Victor Lowe once called "the rough world" of ordinary experience and "the smooth world" of mathematical physics. The distinction is particularly important when Capek is dealing, on the one hand, with James's and Bergson's reflections on the stream of consciousness, and, on the other hand, with the tools of mathematics used by physicists to conceptualize a smooth world of durationless instants and dimen sionless points. The recognition of this distinction, however, does not imply a bifurcation of nature, a strict dualism of "an objective reality possessing a clear-cut logico-mathematical structure" and a "qualitative realm of appearance." The question, in Capek's view, is how far the mathematical interpretation can be applied to our tem poral experience. In two essays, "The Fiction of Instants" and "Two Types of Con tinuity," Capek argues against the idea that the smooth mathematical continuity can be applied to all levels of physical reality. As he says, "In truth, there is considerable circumstantial evidence that the This content downloaded from 130.166.3.5 on Sun, 08 Oct 2017 15:11:38 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms SUMMARIES AND COMMENTS 605 physical world, at least in its deepest microphysical strata, does not possess such sharp edges and clear cut contours as the last century physics hopefully expected. This is perfectly compatible with the fact that nature on the macrophysical level of physiological stimuli is for all practical purposes continuous in a mathematical sense. The main reason why it is so difficult to give up the applicability of math ematical continuity to the microphysical level is that it would imply the admission that there is an irreducible qualitative element in nature which resists a complete mathematization or formalization" (p. 54). Capek concludes, "This absence of instants on both the psychological and physical level suggests that perhaps the microphysical time may have the same paradoxical structure as qualitative temporal continua" (p.j>5). Capek is at his best when he is injecting fresh insight into the philosophical problems of time from his understanding of quantum physics and the theory of relativity. In this regard, one of the finest essays in this volume is "Particles or Events?" After explaining the epistemological difficulties inherent in the particle and wave inter pretation of quantum phenomenon, Capek proposes imageless events as the most plausible ontological foundation for quantum physics. Imageless events seem to be free of the epistemological crudities of visual mechanistic models of the wave-particle dualism, yet they com municate behavior by "complex artificial arrangements" that remind us "alternately of the behavior of macroscopic particles or periodical disturbances in elastic media" (p. 211). In this view, particles are understood to be "successions of spatio-temporal pulsations." Capek argues that events also have the advantage of taking into account two of the most philosophically significant innovations of relativity: the fusion of space and time, and the elimination of the distinction between time-space and its physical content. Capek clearly recognizes that his proposal will be unacceptable to the "rank-and-file physicist" influenced by the orthodox, positivistic interpretation given to quantum phenomena. But if one takes the business of fundamental ontology seriously, the event ontology con sistently accounts for individuality on the microscopic level and does not carry with it metaphysical baggage from earlier periods of physics. For Capek, this primarily means the corpuscular representation of particles which now infects contemporary physics with problems of consistency. The event theory was largely pioneered by Whitehead in the context of relativity theory. Capek's defense of this theory has the advantage of a half century of the development of relativity physics and the quantum theory. But the event theory also brings into focus the primary place of time in his metaphysics. The cate gories of "process," "event," and "change" replace the primacy of sub stance-based interpretations of the world. In the limited space of this review I have focused attention on a few connecting threads in Capek's work. The volume contains equally interesting discussions of Russell, Reichenbach, Piaget, de Broglie, Laplace, Popper, and Einstein that will be stimulating to both phi losophers and physicists.?Leemon B. McHenry, Wittenberg University. This content downloaded from 130.166.3.5 on Sun, 08 Oct 2017 15:11:38 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 606 MATTHEW CUDDEBACK AND STAFF Craig, William Lane. Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom: The Coherence of Theism. New York: E. J. Brill, 1991. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 19. 360 pp. $160.00?This book addresses two questions: "How is genuine future contingency compatible with divine foreknowledge?" and "How is foreknowledge possible?" Craig attempts to reconcile future contingency within the constraints of a Biblically informed conception of God. This volume, a companion to Craig's historical survey The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez (1988), is in contrast to that study, is a synoptic and critical survey of the recent literature on theological fatalism. It discusses such intriguing related topics as logical fatalism, multivalent logic, backward causation, time travel, counterfactuals, Newcomb's problem, and middle knowledge. It is well known that Aristotle's argument for logical fatalism, If p then necessarily q p h Dq (where p is the proposition that it was the case that the sea battle will happen tomorrow and q is the prop osition that the sea battle will happen tomorrow) equivocates between the necessity of the consequence H(p -> q), which renders the argument invalid, and necessity of consequent (p -> Hq), which renders the ar gument unsound. Modern fatalists, however, are quick to point out that they are not implicated in this fallacy because they appeal to our metaphysical intuitions about the "hardness" or "necessity" of the past: if p was the case, then it is not now within anyone's ability to make it that ~p. Given the necessity of the past, the argument for fatalism would appear to be modally valid. Craig critiques Prior and Pike as representative proponents of theological fatalism. Prior argues that fatalism follows if statements about the future can be known to be true in the past. Pike argues that fatalism is entailed by the foreknowledge of a temporal, essen tially omniscient God and that the best escape is to deny the essential omniscience of God. Craig, however, argues that theological fatalism is reducible to purely logical fatalism involving no reference to God or to any knower. The theological fatalist premise that "if God knew that x will do y then x cannot fail to do y" can simply be replaced with the logical fatalism premise to the effect that "if it was true that x will do y then x cannot fail to do y." The false assumption common to both theological and logical fa talism is that fatalism would follow from the assumption that future contingent propositions are true or false prior to the occurrence of their corresponding events. If Craig's analysis is right, Aquinas's view that God's knowledge is timeless would be insufficient to stave off fatalism, if fatalism were valid; nor would Ockham's distinction between hard and soft facts help. According to Craig's diagnosis, talk of the necessity of the past in terms of our "ability to do otherwise" perpetuates a confusion between backward causation?which though logically possible is probably not physically possible?and counterf actual dependence on the past, which is logically benign. It is not now within my ability to bring it about that Caesar was not assassinated. It is within my ability, however, to bring it about that Caesar would not have died less than 2036 years This content downloaded from 130.166.3.5 on Sun, 08 Oct 2017 15:11:38 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms SUMMARIES AND COMMENTS 607 before the writing of this review. The latter, though counterfactually dependent on the past, does not involve backward causation. Our intuitions about the hardness of the past arise from the metaphysical impossibility or at least rare occurrence of backward causation. If one were to have acted otherwise, however, one would not thereby be changing God's beliefs, but rather God would have foreknown oth erwise. With regard to the second question mentioned above, Craig defends middle knowledge against traditional objections. Since middle knowledge is possible and Biblically unobjectionable, Craig is inclined to regard the doctrine as true.?Gary Mar, SUNY at Stony Brook. Dummett, Michael. The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. The William James Lectures, 1976. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. xi + 355 pp. $34.95?This is a revised and expanded version of Dum mett's 1976 William James Lectures at Harvard. Dummett aims to construct a "base camp," in the theory of linguistic meaning, for an "assault on metaphysical peaks." The book begins with a brief dis cussion of metaphysical disputes over realism, and ends, fifteen chap ters later, with a brief treatment of realism and the theory of meaning. The intervening chapters take up such semantical/logical topics as the following: inference and truth; meaning, knowledge, and under standing; truth and meaning-theories; the justification of deduction; and semantical holism. Dummett frequently interacts with the rel evant views of Frege, Tarski, Quine, and Donald Davidson. Several of the chapters are rather technical, focusing on topics in the philosophy of logic. Dummett proposes that answers to metaphysical questions depend on issues about the correct theory of meaning for our language. He holds, more specifically, that we should formulate a systematic de scription of how our language actually functions, and that this will determine the answers to our metaphysical questions. The key as sumption is that "metaphysical questions are formulated in terms of the appropriate picture of the reality to which our statements relate" (p. 338). For example, we have the picture of objective matter within space-time as opposed to the picture of a world of sense perceptions out of which the material world is constructed. Dummett claims that it is useless to treat competing metaphysical pictures as rival hypotheses demanding support by evidence. He advises that we for mulate theses embodying "the intended applications" of the meta physical pictures. Such theses, according to Dummett, belong to the theory of meaning, as they are theses about the correct meaning theory for statements of one kind or another (p. 339). Dummett assumes that once we identify the correct meaning theory, we shall be left either with a compelling metaphysical picture or with the rejection of all the competing pictures. We reach the correct meaning-theory, on his view, by producing a workable This content downloaded from 130.166.3.5 on Sun, 08 Oct 2017 15:11:38 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms