Gavin Coleman's Philosophy Blog

 Simon Caney's arguments in " Environmental Degradation, Reparations, and the Moral Significance of History " are based on environmental climate change and if reparations to "injured" parties should be made. This is closely related to the issue regarding reparations for slavery. Who should be responsible for paying these reparations? Caney talked about the reparations for climate change and focused on a few different parties. The Casual party is made up of the people that literally caused the damage. In regards to climate change the people who caused it could be corporations, governments, or even individuals over one hundred years ago. This relates to slavery because the people that caused slavery were all slave owners and slave traders. The biggest problem with this is that these corporations are no longer around, the governments might not be in power anymore, and these individuals have all passed. Caney also talked about the beneficiary party paying for the re...

I never really thought about the definition of a second until now. I always thought of a second as a measurement of time but nothing deeper than that. A minute is 60 seconds and that is all I ever thought about seconds. In Eran Hal's article " Making Time: A Study in the Epistemology of Measurement" a second is defined as "the duration of exactly 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to a hyperfine transition of caesium-133 in the ground state (BIPM [2006], p. 113)." This is the first time I realized how much science and math go into things like seconds and time. A common misunderstanding is that clocks measure time, this is incorrect they measure a passage of time. Standard clocks measure more than just a passage of time. Standard clocks measure frequencies that correlate to atomic transitions. These clocks are standardized by coordinated universal time or UTC. 

 Relativity of Simultaneity depends on the observers. The concept is that two events that are distant from each other happen at the exact same time. There is no guarantee that they happened at the same time according to the concept of Relativity of Simultaneity. Relativity of Simultaneity is not when lighting strikes and the sound of the thunder comes after, that is referred to as appearance simultaneity. If you are right under the lightning strike you will hear the thunder at the same time you see the lighting but if you are far from the lightning you will see the lightning then hear the thunder after. Time is unreal in Special Relativity. Time is subjective and not the same everywhere. Since Special Relativity shows that time will change due to relative motion like the clock in motion ticking slower than a clock that is stationary this means that time is subjective to everyone. 

 My previous perception of time is that it was made up to add a structure to our lives so we would have a basis to when we need to meet deadlines. I also believe that there is a past, present and future but I do not believe the future is really a thing because any slight movement could change it. Such as, if I decide to skip class one day instead of going I might fail the next test but if I went I would have passed. This is something I have control over so I believe it is very easy to change the future.  In the article The Unreality of Time written by J. Ellis McTaggart there are many arguments against the idea of time. I personally do not see my own view of time in any of McTaggart's arguments. To me the "unreality of time" means that it is made up and that is it. I think to McTaggart the "unreality of time" means much more. I believe that McTaggart does not think time exists at all and that events are just always happening whether you are at that point or not....