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Beliefs of Various Philosophers

Heraclitus stated that it was not possible to step into the same river twice, thus indicating his belief in the prevalence of change all around. Aristotle continues the discussion of change and permanence and their relationship to time in his Physics Heraclitus believed that stability was an illusion. Parmenides thought that motion was an illusion. Plato offered a compromise in his view of a dual world, one unstable and transient and the other permanent and unchanging. Aristotle abandoned Plato's dualism and believed there was only one world, observable and comprehensible, and made up of a plurality of substances.

Aristotle considers the question of time. Time in his view cannot be identified with movement or change because movements are multiple, but time is still connected to movement and change. Our awareness of time and our awareness of change are the same, and change takes place through time and demonstrates the passage of time. Time is conceived as a continuum on which change takes place. The alteration that does take place may be fast or slow, and that which is fast or slow is defined by time. What changes in a short time is fast, and what changes in a long time is slow.

Movement is necessary for a thing to be in time, with movement conceived in the broadest sense. If something is not in movement, it is eternal and will never end, and so is outside of time.

Epicurus sees life as sensation, and this is an unchanging fact in a changing world. Life itself is temporary, and time beyond this life has no meaning to us. Indeed, the future is similarly neither ours nor wholly not ours. For Epicurus, it is the current moment and the sensation within it that is important.

Augustine was a Christian scholar who borrowed heavily from Plato. He agreed with Plato about the status of transcendent Ideas, but he did so in an altered form. Augustine agreed that the Ideas constituted the stable and unchangeable f...

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Beliefs of Various Philosophers. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 02:53, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681811.html