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The Importance of Presents in Contemporary Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

David L. Miller
David L. Miller*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas
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Extract

Until the theory of evolution was developed in recent times, two theories of change were more or less in competition with each other. The first held that ends, purposes, goals, (teleos), are both the cause of change and constitute that toward which change is directed, as when the form of man directs the growth of a child and is the aim of growth. Hence, from this point of view, change is both accounted for and understood through what were called “final causes.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , January 1957 , pp. 19 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © 1957, The Williams & Wilkins Company

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References

1 In The Philosophy of the Present (Chicago: Open Court Publ. Co., 1932) G. H. Mead presents the view that the seat of reality is in a present and that neither past nor future (objects) have existence. Although his book is excellent in showing the importance of presents in contemporary science, he leaves the impression that past and future have no status whatever. What I have tried to show is that a scientific knowledge of both past and future must be approached by way of present observables. This does not deny or affirm that the past was (or is) unreal, nor that the future has no ontological status even now. Scientists do not have to answer such questions in order to affirm the emergence of novelties as well as the thesis that a knowledge of any event, past, present, or future, is attained only by use of present observables.