You are invited attend the first


PHILOSOPHY CLUB MEETING

of the Fall 2004 Semester
4pm, Wednesday, September 15
Idaho Pizza Company, Broadway Ave.


Topic of Discussion:

In spite of certain analogies between time and space, we tend to think
of them as being fundamentally different.  But in what does the
difference consist?  In the following passage, the philosopher
Richard Taylor criticizes one natural answer to this, our
"question of the week"::

It is often claimed that no object can be in two places at once,
though it can occupy two or more times at one place, and some persons
imagine that this expresses a very great and basic difference between
the spatial and temporal relations of objects.  There are two ways in
which an object can occupy two different times at only one place.  It
might simply remain where it is through an interval of time, or it
might be removed from its place and later returned.  Now it does at
first seem as though nothing corresponding to these situations can
ever happen the other way around; that is, that no object can be in
two places at one time, and in particular that it cannot be returned
to a time.  When one tries to imagine situations that might be so
described, he almost unavoidably finds himself thinking of two objects
instead of one.  What must first be noted, however, is that an object
can be in one place at two times only if it also occupies all the time
in between, whether at that same place or another, and it must
accordingly have some temporal length. Otherwise, we find that we are
talking about two objects and not one.  But with a similar provision,
an object surely can be in two places at one time -- by occupying the
space between them as well.  Someone who is standing with one foot in
the doorway and the other outside is occupying two places at once, for
instance.  Of course it is tempting here to object that only a part of
the person is in either place; he is not both entirely inside and
entirely outside. But when this has been said, it must be remembered
that it is a different temporal part of an object that, at a given
place, occupies each of two or more times.  Thus a person might just
stay where he is for a while, and be in the same place at two
different times -- but it is not the same temporal part of the person
that is at those two t imes.  We have to remember that as things are
more or less extended in space and have spatial boundaries, they are
also extended in time and have temporal boundaries, defining their
beginnings and endings.  The intervals between such boundaries, of
either kind, can be divided up into parts, both spatial and temporal.
The comparison so far is, then, quite complete.

Richard Taylor, Metaphysics, 4th ed. (Prentice-Hall, 1992), pp. 70-71.