The Moment of Change

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   1. Introduction

      • Nico Strobach

      Pages 1-19

3. The Moment of Change from Antiquity to the 19th Century

   1. Plato

      • Nico Strobach

      Pages 20-46

   2. Aristotle

      • Nico Strobach

      Pages 47-83

   3. The Moment of Change in the Middle Ages

      • Nico Strobach

      Pages 84-110

   4. Kant, Mendelssohn, Schopenhauer

      • Nico Strobach

      Pages 111-123

4. The Moment of Change in the 20th Century

   1. The Either/or-Option

      • Nico Strobach

      Pages 124-145

   2. The Either-Way-Option

      • Nico Strobach

      Pages 146-160

   3. The Both-States-Option

      • Nico Strobach

      Pages 161-170

   4. The Neither/NOR-Option

      • Nico Strobach

      Pages 171-182

   5. The ‘Neutral Instant Analysis’ (NIA)

      • Nico Strobach

      Pages 183-197

5. A Systematic Suggestion

   1. Introduction

      • Nico Strobach

      Pages 198-200

   2. The Snapshot Myth

      • Nico Strobach

      Pages 201-205

   3. A Path to a Plausible Description of the Moment of Change

      • Nico Strobach

      Pages 206-224

   4. The Classification of the Moment of Change

      • Nico Strobach

      Pages 225-234

6. Back Matter

   Pages 235-305

   PDF

This book is a systematic history of one of the oldest problems in the philosophy of space and time: How is the change from one state to its opposite to be described? To my knowledge it is the first comprehensive book providing information about and analysis of texts on this topic throughout the ages. The target audience I envisaged are advanced students and scholars of analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy who are interested in the philosophy of space and time. Authors treated in this book range from Plato, Aristotle, the logicians of the late Middle Ages, Kant, Brentano and Russell to contemporary authors such as Chisholm, Hamblin, Sorabji or Graham Priest, taking into account such theories as interval semantics or paraconsistent logic. For the first time, two main questions about the moment of change are explicitly kept apart: Which (if any) of the opposite states does the moment of change belong to? And does it contain an instantaneous event? The texts are discussed within a clear framework of the main systematic options for describing the moment of change, sometimes using predicate logic extended by newly introduced logical prefixes. The last part contains a new suggestion of how to solve the problem of the moment of change. It is centred around a theory of instantaneous states which provides a new solution to Zeno's Flying Arrow Paradox.

• Aristotle
• Immanuel Kant
• Plato
• history of philosophy
• logic
• philosophy
• time

• Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, Germany

  Nico Strobach

Policies and ethics