Two Examples From Philosophy
(i) Jean Paul Sartre (see image): You have to choose between staying with your aged, infirm mother to protect her and joining the French Resistance. Which should you do?
Sartre's answer: There is no external authority to tell you which action is right. You decide and accept/live with the consequences.
(ii) I must paraphrase because I cannot find an article from decades ago on Doctor Who and the philosophers in the Aristotelian Society journal.
Question: What happens if a space-time vehicle proceeds, e.g., from London, 2018, to Hastings, 1066?
Answer: Between 1066 and 2018, the vehicle should be visible as if moving slowly from Hastings to London.
Three SF Writers
Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson: What would happen if magic worked like a technology?
Anderson: What would happen if Shakespeare's plays were accurate histories, if the ancient Greeks had had a scientific revolution, if the Jews had never returned from Exile, if Hannibal had sacked Rome etc?
SM Stirling: What would happen if slave-owning society had survived into the twentieth century, if technology stopped working, if Mars and Venus were habitable, if a comet had hit Earth in the nineteenth century etc?
For their answers, please read the relevant works.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I might be wrong, but the impression I got was that the French Resistance during WW II was largely ineffectual and irrelevant. And was never any serious threat to either the Germans or the Vichy gov't. So this man would do more REAL good helping his aged mother. The real "center" of resistance coalesced around Charles de Gaulle.
And we "see" time machines disappearing and reappearing at another time/location in the Time Patrol stories. So it's interesting that serious philosophers disagree that would happen.
A slave owning society, as seen among the Draka, would need to both work out some kinmd of ideology/philosophy justifying and be SMART about maintaining and extending it. They would also need to abandon Christianity because the stress of trying to unite two opposing and contradictory systems of belief would become intolerable.
I have wondered if some Draka might have looked at Islam, because the principles of that religion would not undermine slavery.
I agree with what you said about reading the works of Anderson and Stirling. And the latter's Shadowspawn books is really good as paranoid urban fantasy! I've reached Chapter 8 or 9 of Anderson's THERE WILL BE TIME.
Sean
Sean,
We have to ask why should a traveling time machine be invisible and impalpable? Wells' answer doesn't work.
Patrol timecycles do (somehow) disappear from one set of spatiotemporal coordinates and appear at another without existing between them.
Paul.
Sean,
A decision has to be made in the light of the knowledge held at the time. Thus, probably someone would not know that the Resistance was going to be ineffective.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And the difficulties you raised about time machines strengthens my skepticism about time traveling. I take alternate worlds/universes more seriously.
I think it only needed a few months after France surrendered to Germany in 1940 for most to realize that the "resistance" was largely a joke.
Sean
Kaor, Sean!
First, the French Resistance could not defeat the Wehrmacht and liberate France, but it did help smuggle Allied pilots to Spain, provide intelligence on the Nazis, and otherwise assist the Allied cause.
As to the Draka, one might imagine them being attracted to Islam, but I don’t think there’s any evidence of that in Stirling’s books. At one point, a Draka tells a Christian serf that the Draka will defang Christianity; she should compare the Quran which Muslim serfs are allowed to have with the original. Religious Draka are if anything likely to be Aesirtru.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas!
I agree with what you said about the French Resistance. My caveat being that the things you listed were not CRUCIAL, not a serious threat to the Germans or the Vichy regime.
I actually did have in mind how the Draka revised the Koran their Muslim serfs used. And I remember what that Draka female said to Sister Marya in UNDER THE YOKE. But the "defanging" does not seem to have "taken," as we see in THE STONE DOGS. The Catholic Church, even within Draka held territory, cooperated with the anti-Draka resistance.
Yes, I agree none of the Draka seemed to have been seriously interested in Islam. And those Draka who remained Christians found themselves under the hostile scrutiny of the Security Directorate. And the effort to revive worship of the Eddaic gods petered out and failed.
Best regards! Sean
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