The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.’ One thing is certain and the rest is Lies One thing at least is certain - This Life flies ‘Oh, threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise! But one thing we do know is this-life is short and death is inevitable and invincible. The truth is, none of us knows for sure whether determinism is true or free will is true. Those who think it is one or the other or both are really making what is only an assumption. Now is the portal through which we experience the present moment, indeed every moment … but only one moment at a time.ĭo we have free will, or is everything a matter of fate and destiny? Or are both ideas true? Having studied philosophy deeply for many decades, I say this-we really don’t know. We are here now … and that’s all that truly matters. What if those hopes and expectations are dashed and never fulfilled, which could well happen? Face it. We have hopes and expectations for the future. So, we could have lived that way, or this way, but what does it matter? We are here now … and that’s all that truly matters. Most of us have regrets about the past, perhaps about certain acts or omissions on our part? Well, let the past stay in the past. Nothing, nothing had the least importance and I knew quite well why.’ (The Stranger, Vintage Books edition, translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert, pp 74-75.) And what did that mean? That, all the time, I’d been waiting for this present moment, for that dawn, tomorrow’s or another day’s, which was to justify me. I’d acted thus, and I hadn’t acted otherwise I hadn’t done x, whereas I had done y or z. ‘I’d passed my life in a certain way, and I might have passed it in a different way, if I’d felt like it. Toward the end of the novel, just a short time before he is due to be executed, and after he has put that pesky priest in his place, Meursault soberly reflects upon his life, a life which very soon is going to be terminated by the State: He eventually comes to terms with his impending and inevitable death by realizing that life, indeed the entire universe, is benignly indifferent to our fate. The ‘hero’ of the book, Meursault, is condemned to death. Yes, we must abandon hope but yet not despair. Still, we are ultimately free, and ever the more so if, paradoxically, we learn to live without hope. Each of us will die, and death is a process which begins the very moment that we are born. There is also a creative tension, both in Camus’ works and in life itself, between oppression, bondage and oblivion on the one hand and freedom and joy on the other. Additionally, it is possible for us to be happy even in a world of tragedy, irrationality, manifest injustice, and suffering. On the one hand, life is absurd, irrational, futile, and manifestly unjust, but on the other hand we are rational beings-at least in potentiality-and therefore not absurd. There is a philosophical tension in Camus’ philosophy of life. It is centred around a theory of instantaneous states which provides a new solution to Zeno's Flying Arrow Paradox.Ever since studying French in college some 45 or more years ago I have loved the works of Albert Camus and, in particular, his 1942 novel L’Etranger (The Stranger/The Outsider). The last part contains a new suggestion of how to solve the problem of the moment of change. For the first time, two main questions about the moment of change are explicitly kept apart: Which (if any) of the opposite states does the moment of change belong to? And does it contain an instantaneous event? The texts are discussed within a clear framework of the main systematic options for describing the moment of change, sometimes using predicate logic extended by newly introduced logical prefixes. Authors treated in this book range from Plato, Aristotle, the logicians of the late Middle Ages, Kant, Brentano and Russell to contemporary authors such as Chisholm, Hamblin, Sorabji or Graham Priest, taking into account such theories as interval semantics or paraconsistent logic. The target audience I envisaged are advanced students and scholars of analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy who are interested in the philosophy of space and time. This book is a systematic history of one of the oldest problems in the philosophy of space and time: How is the change from one state to its opposite to be described? To my knowledge it is the first comprehensive book providing information about and analysis of texts on this topic throughout the ages.
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