Change, Cause & Time

Eight steps through the moving world: how things become, why they happen, and whether time flows.

A course on the thought of Metaphysics.

What you will learn

  • State Parmenides' argument that 'what is not' cannot be, so coming-to-be is impossible and being is changeless.
  • State Heraclitus' flux and the unity of opposites — and see that the river is the SAME by always changing.
  • Feel the aporia: change seems both undeniable and impossible — the knot the rest of the course unties.
  • Analyze any change into three: a persisting substratum, a form gained, and the privation it replaces.
  • See how this answers Parmenides: change comes not from 'not-being simply' but from being-potentially.
  • Apply potentiality/actuality: the changing thing was the new form potentially, and becomes it actually.
  • Name and distinguish the four causes and apply all four to a single thing (a statue, a house, an organism).
  • See efficient and final cause as the two most contested — the 'maker' and the 'for-the-sake-of'.

Course outline

  1. Does Anything Stay the Same? — The opening clash of metaphysics: Parmenides argues that change is impossible and being is one, unborn, unchanging; Heraclitus that all things flow and the only constant is change itself. The student…
  2. Coming-to-Be Without Contradiction — Aristotle's resolution: change is not being arising from sheer non-being, but a substratum taking on a new form in place of a privation. Matter persists; form replaces form. Potentiality and…
  3. Why Things Happen — The Four Causes — Aristotle's four causes — material, formal, efficient, final — as four complete answers to 'why?'. The world is shot through with real causal powers and ends. This realism is the position Hume will…
  4. Is There Any Necessary Connection? — Hume's demolition of causal necessity: we observe constant conjunction and temporal succession, but never the 'necessary connection' itself. The idea of causal power has no answering impression; it…
  5. Saving the Cause — Kant's rescue: Hume is right that necessity is not GIVEN in experience — but causality is a category the understanding brings TO experience, a condition without which there could be no objective…
  6. Cause as Counterfactual — Lewis's counterfactual analysis: c causes e when, had c not occurred, e would not have. Causation is difference-making, spelled out via the nearest possible worlds. A modern Humean answer that needs…
  7. Does Time Pass? — Does time really flow, or is 'passage' an illusion? Augustine's ancient puzzle opens it; Bergson defends lived duration against time spatialized into clock-units; the B-theorist (Lewis) defends the…
  8. Surviving Through Time — How does one thing persist through change and time? Endurantism: a thing is wholly present at each moment (Aristotle's substance). Perdurantism: a thing is spread out in temporal parts (Lewis). The…

Works read in this course

  • Heraclitus & Parmenides, the fragments — flux vs the One unchanging being
  • Aristotle, Physics I-II — change via substratum/form/privation; the four causes
  • Hume, Enquiry / Treatise — the critique of necessary connection
  • Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Second Analogy) — causality as a condition of experience
  • D. Lewis, 'Causation' (1973) — counterfactual analysis of causation
  • Bergson, Time and Free Will / Creative Evolution — lived duration vs spatialized time

Terms introduced

flux, substratum (of change), potentiality and actuality, the four causes, efficient cause, final cause, constant conjunction, necessary connection, category (Kant), counterfactual, duration (durée), A-series / B-series, endurantism / perdurantism

Part of the Simposeum course library.