British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

BA PDF Symposium 2005

26 April 2005

Abstracts

ABOUT THIS EVENT | PROGRAMME

Dr Thomas Sattig

Is Time like Space?

Prima facie, there is an asymmetry between the way in which ordinary objects, such as persons and tables, are in time and the way in which they are in space. An object persists through time; it exists at different times. But an object does not persist through space; it occupies no more than a single place at a time. Moreover, an object has parts corresponding to parts of places – a person has limbs, a table has legs – but an object does not seem to have parts corresponding to parts of time. According to some philosophers – the four-dimensionalists - this asymmetry between space and time is superficial: when the underlying nature of persistence through time is revealed, it turns out that just as an object occupies a unique spatial region and has spatial parts, so an object occupies a unique temporal region and has temporal parts. The three-dimensionalists reject this account of persistence and hold that the prima facie asymmetry between space and time cannot be explained away. Who is right? I shall discuss two arguments, one in favour of four-dimensionalism and the other in favour of three-dimensionalism. The argument in favour of four-dimensionalism concerns the intuition that no more than one person or table fits into a given place at a time. The argument in favour of three-dimensionalism concerns the intuition that it is possible that exactly one person or table exist at a time.

Dr Thomas Sattig studied philosophy at the University of Tübingen and Stanford University, before completing the BPhil. and the DPhil in Philosophy at Oxford University. He is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. Sattig's areas of specialisation are metaphysics and philosophy of language. His research interests include the metaphysics of material objects and the philosophy of time. His book The Language and Reality of Time will be published by OUP in 2005.