Mini-seminor 4

Speaker: Suzuka Komatsu
 
Title: The Diachronic Unity of Minimal Experimental Self
 

 This talk investigates the diachronicity of the self. My inquiry focuses on the diachronic nature of a minimal experiential self, that is a self as a phenomenological dimension of experience. When thinking about a question regarding a self over time, there are different kinds of questions: the persistence, continuity, and numerically identical self over time. Among them, the gap problem, posed by a proponent of the experiential self (Dainton, 2008), is intriguing for minimal experiential self theorists. I believe that the minimal experiential self theory, especially Zahavi’s theory, can account for the diachronic unity of the self even though they face the gap problem. To examine whether a minimal experiential self has a sort of diachronicity, I will firstly identify questions about the diachronic unity of a self and analyse how the minimal experiential self theorists should treat the gap problem. I then focus on the debate between Dainton and Zahavi to consider whether Zahavi evade the gap problem.
 

Speaker: Ryo Yamana
 
Title: Reconstructing McTaggard's Paradox: Toward A New Understanding of The Passage of Time
 

 
In this presentation I will argue that the account of passage of time offered by A theorists fails. Traditionally, the notion of passage has been defined as a kind of change like “change of A properties (pastness, presentness and futureness)" and “change of truth value.” It is true that this definition is fairly close to our ordinary conception of it. According to my thesis that I will propose, however, the passage cannot be explained as a special case of change. This is because, as I will argue, change of A properties or truth value includes four principles-- Absoluteness, Relativity, Uniqueness, and Commonality which cannot be coherently combined together. Taking the impossibility of combining all of these four principles together into consideration, we are able to reconstruct the traditional argument against the passage of time, McTaggart’s Paradox, as well as the debate about it between A theorists and B theorists. By using the four principles just mentioned above, I will show that arguments of neither A theorists nor B theorists succeed since both sides beg the question. The reason for this is that they wrongly regard the passage as a kind of change. My argument itself neither argues for nor against the reality of passage, but rather shows the necessity of finding a new way of thinking about the passage of time.