Temporal Synechism: A Peircean Philosophy of Time
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Temporal Synechism: A Peircean Philosophy of Time Jon Alan Schmidt1 Received: 15 May 2020 / Accepted: 12 October 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Charles Sanders Peirce is best known as the founder of pragmatism, but the name that he preferred for his overall system of thought was ‘‘synechism’’ because the principle of continuity was its central thesis. He considered time to be the paradigmatic example and often wrote about its various aspects while discussing other topics. This essay draws from many of those widely scattered texts to formulate a distinctively Peircean philosophy of time, incorporating extensive quotations into a comprehensive and coherent synthesis. Time is not an existential subject with past, present, and future as its incompatible predicates, but rather a real law enabling things to possess contrary qualities at its different determinations, and Peirce identifies four classes of such states based on when and how they are realized. Because time is continuous, it is not composed of instants, and even the present is an indefinite lapse during which we are directly aware of constant change. The accomplished past is perpetually growing as the possibilities and conditional necessities of the future are actualized at the present, and the entire universe evolves from being utterly indeterminate toward being absolutely determinate. Nevertheless, time must return into itself even if events are limited to only a portion of it, a paradox that is resolved with the aid of projective geometry. Temporal synechism thus touches on a broad spectrum of philosophical issues including mathematics, phenomenology, logic, and metaphysics. Keywords Charles Peirce Continuity Cosmology Instant Lapse Logic Moment Phenomenology Present Time
& Jon Alan Schmidt [email protected] 1
Independent Scholar, Olathe, KS, USA
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Axiomathes
1 The Hypothesis of Time In a paper that established the parameters for many of the debates within the philosophy of time ever since its publication, McTaggart (1908) argues for ‘‘The Unreality of Time.’’ He begins by describing time as having ‘‘positions’’ called moments and defining an event as the contents of a single moment (p. 458). As such, he treats both moments and events as discrete and arranged in series: • The A series is ‘‘the series of positions running from the far past through the near past to the present, and then from the present to the near future and the far future’’ (ibid). • The B series is ‘‘[t]he series of positions which runs from earlier to later’’ (ibid). • The C series is ‘‘a series of the permanent relations to one another of those realities which in time are events’’ (p. 461). The A series and B series are both temporal, consisting of moments, but the C series is not; ‘‘it involves no change, but only an order’’ of events, and ‘‘while it determines the order, [it] does not determine the direction’’ (p. 462). The B series also involves no change, because the relations of
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