Future, Present, & Past:   Oυδεὶς άμουσος εἰσίτω  Wednesday,
June 16, 2010  Eternity and objects  I have been thinking of
late about the debate between theorists who see an entity as
irreducibly itself, and those who claim that any entity is only
insofar as it is related to other entities. When I am in a
Buddhist frame of mind I tend to have a great deal of sympathy
with this latter position. The Buddha's teaching of
pratityasamutpada, variously translated as Mutual or
[Inter]dependent [Co-]arising or Origination, asserts that
everything arises and passes away as a continuous ongoing
intercausal process. This teaching seems to me to be very close
to claims inspired by Bradley, Whitehead, Deleuze, or Latour, to
the effect that any entity just is the sum of its relations at
any moment. This means that a being is not the same as it was an
instant ago; that you cannot, indeed, step into a river twice,
not just because the river has changed but because you have. Of
course, this also means that it is nonsensical to