Abstract
AbstractThe Nothing from Infinity paradox arises when the combination of two infinitudes of point particles meet in a supertask and disappear. Corral-Villate claims that my arguments for disappearance fail and concedes that this failure also produces an extreme kind of indeterminism, which I have called plenitudinous. So my supertask at least poses a dilemma of extreme indeterminism within Newtonian point particle mechanics. Plenitudinous indeterminism might be trivial, although easy attempts to prove it so seem to fail in the face of plausible continuity principles. However, the question of its triviality is here moot, since I show that, except in one case, Corral-Villate’s disproofs fail, and with a correction, the original arguments are unrefuted. Consequently, of the two contenders for the outcome of my supertask, the Nothing from Infinity paradox has won out.
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
History and Philosophy of Science,Philosophy
Reference11 articles.
1. Benardete, J. (1964). Infinity: An Essay in Metaphysics. Clarendon Press.
2. Black, M. (1950). Achilles and the tortoise. Analysis, 11, 91–101.
3. Corral-Villate, A. (2020). On Shackel’s nothing from infinity paradox. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 10, 26.
4. Ketland, J. (2021). Foundations of applied mathematics. Synthese, 199, 4151–4193.
5. Moore, A. W. (1990). The Infinite. Routledge.