Kent A. Peacock

The purpose of this paper is to pick up the threads of a debate about the ontology of becoming in spacetime that was triggered by a provocative article published by Nicholas Maxwell in 1985. This debate is itself merely a recent episode in a long dialogue that goes back at least as far as the time of Parmenides and Heraclitus. Here is the question around which this debate centres: is change or becoming the distinguishing feature of the natural or physical world, as suggested obscurely by Heraclitus and argued at length by Aristotle? Or is our usual uncritical belief in the reality of change the product of some sort of perceptual illusion or intellectual error, as believed by Parmenides and a small host of recent authors such as Gödel and Julian Barbour? I won’t be able to solve the whole of this momentous problem here. However, I intend both to set aside a few unwarranted assumptions which have for a long time dogged our thinking about the puzzle of becoming, and to assemble some tools which should aid in finding a solution to it. In particular, I will argue that we can do much better than is usually supposed in identifying structures which can both “live” within Minkowski spacetime and represent objective becoming. I shall also discuss whether such structures would necessarily contradict the Principle.

The most pressing problems facing humanity today - over-population, energy shortages, climate change, soil erosion, species extinctions, the risk of epidemic disease, the threat of warfare that could destroy all the hard-won gains of civilization, and even the recent fibrillations of the stock market - are all ecological or have a large ecological component. in this volume philosophers turn their attention to understanding the science of ecology and its huge implications for the human project. To get the application of ecology to policy or other practical concerns right, humanity needs a clear and disinterested philosophical understanding of ecology which can help identify the practical lessons of science. Conversely, the urgent practical demands humanity faces today cannot help but direct scientific and philosophical investigation toward the basis of those ecological challenges that threaten human survival. This book will help to fuel the timely renaissance of interest in philosophy of ecology that is now occurring in the philosophical profession. Provides a bridge between philosophy and current scientific findings Covers theory and applications Encourages multi-disciplinary dialogue.

Not too many metaphysicians in these hypercritical times would dream of offering a theory of everything, but Storrs McCall, who modestly compares his new book to The Origin of Species, claims that his theory may accomplish nothing less than to "illuminate, perhaps even resolve" problems such as "the direction and flow of time; what causation consists of; the nature of scientific laws; the interpretation of quantum mechanics; objective probability; counterfactuals and related conditionals; the identity of individuals across possible worlds; essential properties... practical reason and decision, and the problem of free will". His attempt is breathtaking in its thoroughness and ingenuity.

I present a thought experiment in quantum mechanics and tease out some of its implications for the doctrine of “peaceful coexistence”, which, following Shimony, I take to be the proposition that quantum mechanics does not force us to revise or abandon the relativistic picture of causality. I criticize the standard arguments in favour of peaceful coexistence on the grounds that they are question-begging, and suggest that the breakdown of Lorentz-invariant relativity as a principle theory would be a natural development, given the general trend of physics in this century.

It is generally believed that an invariant notion of a global present or "Now" cannot be defined in special relativity, because of the relativity of optical simultaneity. I argue that this may be a non sequitur since it is not necessarily the case that the psychological "Now" should be thought of as associated with constant time slices in spacetime. By considering a science fictional version of the Twin Paradox due to Robert A. Heinlein, I argue that it is psychologically plausible to associate the common specious present of several observers in relative motion with certain hypersurfaces of proper time of those observers corrected for acceleration history and relative motion in an obvious way. If this is correct then the relativity of optical simultaneity may be simply irrelevant to the question of the relativity of a globally distinguished "present".

This paper argues that fitness is most usefully understood as those properties of organisms that are explanatory of survival in the broadest sense, not merely descriptive of reproductive success. Borrowing from Rosenberg and Bouchard , fitness in this sense is ecological in that it is defined by the interactions between organisms and environments. There are three sorts of ecological fitness: the well-documented ability to compete, the ability to cooperate , and a third sense of fitness that has received insufficient attention in evolutionary theory, the ability to construct. Following Lotka, it can be understood thermodynamically as the ability to maintain or enlarge the energy-circulating capacity of an ecosystem. An organism that does this could end with its gene frequency unchanged but its probability of survival enhanced since it would sustain or increase the total carrying capacity of its ecosystem. Photosynthesizers and other autotrophs are obvious candidates for organisms that are fit in the constructive sense, but any organisms, including heterotrophs, can exhibit constructive fitness if they have some mechanism for channeling external flows of free energy into their ecosystems. I will briefly examine the prospects for the human species in the light of these considerations