Change, Cause & Time

Eight steps through the moving world: how things become, why they happen, and whether time flows.

A course on the thought of Metaphysics.

Course outline

Does Anything Stay the Same? — The opening clash of metaphysics: Parmenides argues that change is impossible and being is one, unborn, unchanging; Heraclitus that all things flow and the only constant is change itself. The student…
Coming-to-Be Without Contradiction — Aristotle's resolution: change is not being arising from sheer non-being, but a substratum taking on a new form in place of a privation. Matter persists; form replaces form. Potentiality and…
Why Things Happen — The Four Causes — Aristotle's four causes — material, formal, efficient, final — as four complete answers to 'why?'. The world is shot through with real causal powers and ends. This realism is the position Hume will…
Is There Any Necessary Connection? — Hume's demolition of causal necessity: we observe constant conjunction and temporal succession, but never the 'necessary connection' itself. The idea of causal power has no answering impression; it…
Saving the Cause — Kant's rescue: Hume is right that necessity is not GIVEN in experience — but causality is a category the understanding brings TO experience, a condition without which there could be no objective…
Cause as Counterfactual — Lewis's counterfactual analysis: c causes e when, had c not occurred, e would not have. Causation is difference-making, spelled out via the nearest possible worlds. A modern Humean answer that needs…
Does Time Pass? — Does time really flow, or is 'passage' an illusion? Augustine's ancient puzzle opens it; Bergson defends lived duration against time spatialized into clock-units; the B-theorist (Lewis) defends the…
Surviving Through Time — How does one thing persist through change and time? Endurantism: a thing is wholly present at each moment (Aristotle's substance). Perdurantism: a thing is spread out in temporal parts (Lewis). The…

Part of the Symposium course library.