3/20/2023 0 Comments Past present futureMany absolutists argued that we cannot imagine deleting time from the Universe. He twists an argument made by absolutists. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) put a new spin on time. British interest picked up following the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, but this attitude shift took decades to arrive. This was partly due to the Scottish Enlightenment, which discouraged studying abstract, abstruse topics. Major British philosophers of this era ignored time, including Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, George Jardine, Mary Wollstonecraft. Isaac Newton and other absolutists held that time is a kind of being, independent of the created world.īy the mid-18th century, time had slipped off the menu again, especially in Britain. Time became a huge topic from the mid-17th century, when debate raged over ‘absolutism’. Medieval philosophers occasionally puzzled over time, with Augustine and Thomas Aquinas pondering God’s eternity. In Western philosophy, time jumps on and off the menu. Like most human things, philosophy has fashions. What was unusual is how McTaggart thought about time. In itself, this was not unusual – during this period, many philosophers were similarly absorbed. A colleague observed that McTaggart ‘added greatly to the gaiety of college meetings’, for he was liable to use arguments that ‘everyone accepted, to support conclusions which no one else had thought of’.įrom his earliest work, McTaggart obsessed over time. Despite his gentleness, McTaggart was ingenious. Russell and McTaggart were part of the ‘Mad Tea Party of Trinity’: Russell the Mad Hatter, and McTaggart with his ‘innocent, sleepy air’ the Dormouse. ![]() Of their first meeting, Bertrand Russell wrote that he was ‘even shyer than I was’: McTaggart was too shy to enter Russell’s room, and Russell too shy to ask him in. McTaggart was a Cambridge philosopher, working in Trinity College through the turn of the 20th century. I think the debate was started just over 100 years ago, by one man: John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart. How did this disagreement come about? Although it sounds like the sort of thing that philosophers have wrangled over for millennia, I say it’s relatively recent. Pastness, presentness and futurity seem to be real features of the world, but are they really? Philosophers disagree, and this debate pervades books such as Time and Space (2001) by Barry Dainton, and A Companion to the Philosophy of Time (2013), edited by Adrian Bardon and Heather Dyke. When the big day arrives, the party is present afterwards, it slips into memory and the past. A birthday party lies in the future, approaching slowly. Some events seem to be present, while others are future or past. In keeping with the off-the-wall predictability of songwriter George Morton's productions, the instrumental break took off into a soaring string-laden waltz of the kind to be heard in grand movie romances, introduced by Weiss' spoken "shall we dance?" "Past, Present and Future" is not a record you can hum or dance to, but has a captivating, if bleak, aura not comparable to many other discs - past, present, or future.Events happen in order – you whisk icing before decorating a cake. Weiss' almost panicked warnings not to touch her there, as that would never happen again, were the record's main indications that the regrettable action of the "past" might have been a rape. This hinted at a past tragedy that had made her present shaky and her future uncertain, the chronology cued by the Shangri-Las' backup utterances indicating the "past" tense and so on. Against an unbearably sad backdrop of orchestration, highlighted by the sort of classical piano heard on "Remember (Walking in the Sand)," Mary Weiss dramatically recited a monologue. ![]() Whatever, it was a most unusual single in that not a single line was sung, although it was not a spoken-word track or a novelty: there was a spoken narrative, backup spoken chants, and lush near-classical music. Why didn't it get higher, and why is it virtually never played on the radio? Perhaps it was a little too similar in mood to their previous "Remember (Walking in the Sand)" perhaps the implied subject matter of someone who might not only be recovering from a failed romance, but from a sexual assault, was too controversial. "Past, Present and Future" only made number 59 in 1966, but is one of the finest records the Shangri-Las made, and one of the most radically structured pop songs of its time.
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