Space, Time, and Causality: An Essay in Natural Philosophy

by J.R. Lucas

Space, Time and Causality An Essay in Natural Philosophy

Genres: Metaphysics

214 pages, Hardcover

First published March 21, 1985

Reviews

[Timothy Morrison]

🍑It is clear then that neither the name of “external world,” nor its definition, conceals any supposition as to the mode of existence of the object of cognition; even if I presuppose (and this is a matter of indifference for physics) that only percepts can be an object of immediate knowledge, that therefore the mind can know only its own states, it is a matter of indifference whether I conjecture that these states are the mind’s own creations, or that they are caused by some external entity, existing outside the mind and independent of it. Physics, as we have already said above, is concerned only with percepts, and not with the manner in which they enter the mind, or arise within the mind; and the view to which we give the preference in this matter is a matter of personal predilection; as far as physics is ​concerned, our choice will remain without consequences. If it better satisfies our metaphysical preconceptions and habits, or preferences, we shall not commit any error if by the external world we understand some common source of percepts, the action of which on cognately constituted minds gives rise to analogous states within these minds; that the se states are analogous is inferred by each of the given minds from contact with others. Such a view of the external world as a source and cause of percepts, I think, actually predominates with the majority of physicists, perhaps implicitly with the majority of them; from the point of view of physics it cannot be erroneous, while from the point of view of natural philosophy it means a certain facilitation of the processes of thought by fixing a symbol for a comparatively concrete concept. It must, however, be clearly remembered that from the point of view of physics we are making no new assumption, but that we only replace the postulate of the correspondence between the contents and relations of two minds (which must exist in both minds, if it is to be a correspondence) by the postulate that a certain part of these minds is common to both; whether “within them” or “beyond them” is a question of metaphysics, with no bearing upon physics at all.

[Shuaib Choudhry · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent introduction to the philosophical foundations of contemporary physics dealing with the concepts of space, time and causality from a principled viewpoint.