Abstract
The causal theory of time, which had occupied an important place in the thought of Leibniz and of Kant, again became a subject of central philosophic interest during the current century after its detailed elaboration and logical refinement at the hands of G. Lechalas,1 H. Reichenbach,2 K. Lewin,3 R. Carnap,4 and H. Mehlberg.5 Specifically, it earned its new prominence in recent decades by its role in the magisterial and beautiful constructions of the relativistic topology of both time and space by Reichenbach6 and Carnap.7 More recently, I used the causal theory of time to show semantically that, with respect to the relation “later than” the events of physics can meaningfully possess the seemingly counter-intuitive denseness property of the linear Cantorean continuum. And, in this way, I was able to supply the semantical nervus probandi which had been lacking in Russell’s mathematical refutation of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion.8
See Append. §§11 and 12
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Notes
G. Léchalas: Étude sur Vespace et le temps (Paris: Alean Publishing Company; 1896).
H. Reichenbach: Axiomatik der relativistischen Raum-Zeit-Lehre (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg & Sons; 1924).
K. Lewin: “Die zeitliche Geneseordnung,” Zeitschrift für Physik, Vol. XIII (1923), p. 16.
R. Carnap: “Über die Abhängigkeit der Eigenschaften des Raumes von denen der Zeit,” Kantstudien, Vol. XXX (1925), p. 331.
H. Mehlberg: “Essai sur la théorie caúsale du temps,” Studia Philosophica, Vol. I (1935), and Vol. I I (1937).
H. Reichenbach: Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Company; 1928), esp. pp. 307–308. The English translation entitled The Philosophy of Space and Time, op. cit., will hereafter be cited as “PST.”.
Carnap: Abriss der Logistik (Vienna: Julius Springer: 1929), Sec. 36, pp. 80–85. Cf. also his Symbolische Logik (Vienna: Julius Springer; 1954), Sees. 48–50, pp. 169–81; an English translation, Introduction to Symbolic Logic and Its Applications was published by Dover Publications, Inc., New York, in 1958. For an interesting comparison of Kant’s version of the theory with the conceptions propounded by Carnap, Reichenbach, and Mehlberg, see H. Scholz: “Eine Topologie der Zeit im Kantischen Sinne,” Dialéctica, Vol. IX (1955), p. 66.
W. B. Taylor: The Meaning of Time in Science and Daily Life, doer toral dissertation (Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles; 1953), pp. 37–39.
Cf. N. Goodman: Fact, Fiction and Forecast (Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 1955), csp. pp. 13–31.
S. Chandrasekhar and J. P. Wright: “The Ccodcsics in Codcl’s Universe,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. XLVIII (1961), pp. 341–47, and csp. p. 347.
A. Grünbaum: “Relativity and the Atomicity of Becoming,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. IV (1950), pp. 143–86.
Cf. Paul Weiss: Reality (New York: Peter Smith; 1949), p. 228.
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© 1973 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Grünbaum, A. (1973). The Causal Theory of Time. In: Philosophical Problems of Space and Time. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2622-2_7
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