Extract
How real is substantial change?
Does anything ever really come into or go out of existence? Certainly, the idea of there being such changes can seem deeply puzzling and problematic, to the extent that many philosophers have sought to deny their occurrence or to explicate talk of them in ways which seem to transform them into something less profound than they intuitively are. I believe, however, that reflection on the issue reveals that change of this kind is the most fundamental of all and that understanding it is the key to understanding the nature of time itself. Indeed, without change of this kind, I shall argue, there could be no such thing as the passage of time.
I. The varieties of change There are, implicit in our commonsense ways of talking about the world, at least four different varieties of real change that can occur to objects--qualitative change, relational change, compositional change, and substantial change. A qualitative change occurs when the same object--or, to use an older terminology, the same individual substance--undergoes a change in respect of its qualities or properties; for example, when it changes in shape or colour. A relational change occurs when two or more individual substances undergo a change in respect of some (external) relation that obtains between them: for example, when they become spatially closer to one another. A compositional change occurs when a composite individual substance undergoes a change in respect of the individual substances that compose it: for example, when some of the bricks composing a wall are replaced by new bricks. Finally, a substantial change occurs when an individual substance either comes into or goes out of existence, that is, when it is either created or destroyed: for example, when a living creature dies. As these examples indicate, all of these varieties of change are accepted as commonplace in the metaphysical scheme embodied in our everyday ways of talking about the world. Philosophers who acknowledge all such varieties of change as real sometimes contrast them with what has been called 'mere Cambridge change', such as the 'change' undergone by one tree when another tree grows taller than it, rendering the first tree smaller than the second. In this case, it is said, it is the second tree that has really changed--namely, in respect of its height--whereas the first tree has remained qualitatively the same in this respect. (It is not...See the full content of this document
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