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Discussion: Quentin Smith on Infinity and the Past

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Ellery Eells
Ellery Eells*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Abstract

In a recent commendable article, Quentin Smith (1987) exposes fatal flaws in several recent attempts to demonstrate that it is logically impossible for the past to be infinite. However, his analysis of one of these flawed arguments—involving an interesting version of Russell's “Tristram Shandy paradox”—is off the mark, as I show in this paper.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , September 1988 , pp. 453 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Science Foundation (research grant no. SES-8605440) for financial support during the time this paper was written.

References

REFERENCES

Craig, W. L. (1979), The Kalam Cosmological Argument. New York: Harper & Row.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Russell, B. (1938), The Principles of Mathematics. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Smith, Q. (1987), “Infinity and the Past”, Philosophy of Science 54: 63–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar