Richard M. Gale

I'm cleaning up my papers and collections and this book is on the list for disposal. But always hard to do. I did a course in the Philosophy of time and used this as a major reference and when i start looking through it again, I find that I have a great affection for the subject matter and the essays it contains. Ahh....McTaggart's paradox on the unreality of time. They all claim to have solved it. But I'm not so sure.
This book is more or less a linguistic analysis of ordinary language philosophy ..and "common-sense" concepts of time. I'm afraid that I must side with the physicists here because common sense ideas of time have no place in .say, quantum behaviour and time....nor with relativistic time where clocks travelling faster measure time as slower than a stationary clock. But still a fascinating book. It also contains a critique of the book which is equally fascinating and the reviewer more or less repudiates all that Gale is saying. OK the book is now 55 years old but still worth three stars from me.… (mehr)