溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Does Time Exist Without Things, or Is It Only the Order of Events?
Can we say that an empty time, in which no event occurs, still flows?
Time is an order of successions.
The correspondence between Leibniz and Newton's camp (Clarke) was the most famous modern contest over the nature of time. Newton defended an absolute time flowing alone, indifferent to events; Leibniz countered with relationism, that time is only the relation of events. The two worldviews stood taut for two centuries until receiving an unexpected verdict from Einstein — relativity seemed to favor Leibniz in denying absolute time, yet left something of Newton in treating spacetime as a stage real in itself. Whether time exists alone or only in relation is still contested, in physics and philosophy, after the correspondence.
For us, quick to see time as an empty vessel, Leibniz's question — that without events there is no time — recalls how entangled time is with the events of a life.
Leibniz flatly rejects Newton's absolute time.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Leibniz flatly rejects Newton's absolute time. As space is the order of things coexisting, time is only the order of events succeeding one another. An empty time in which nothing happens can be neither observed nor distinguished, so such a time is not real. I sense this relational view did not tear time from things but reattached it between events. Time is because something happens. Before the question of whether we can imagine a time without events, I too come to a halt.
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