What if gravity satisfied the Klein-Gordon equation? Both particle physics from the 1920s-30s and the 1890s Neumann-Seeliger modification of Newtonian gravity with exponential decay suggest considering a "graviton mass term" for gravity, which is _algebraic_ in the potential. Unlike Nordström's "massless" theory, massive scalar gravity is strictly special relativistic in the sense of being invariant under the Poincaré group but not the 15-parameter Bateman-Cunningham conformal group. It therefore exhibits the whole of Minkowski space-time structure, albeit only indirectly concerning volumes. (...) Massive scalar gravity is plausible in terms of relativistic field theory, while violating most interesting versions of Einstein's principles of general covariance, general relativity, equivalence, and Mach. Geometry is a poor guide to understanding massive scalar gravity: matter sees a conformally flat metric due to universal coupling, but gravity also sees the rest of the flat metric in the mass term. What is the 'true' geometry, one might wonder, in line with Poincaré's modal conventionality argument? Infinitely many theories exhibit this bimetric 'geometry,' all with the total stress-energy's trace as source; thus geometry does not explain the field equations. The irrelevance of the Ehlers-Pirani-Schild construction to a critique of conventionalism becomes evident when multi-geometry theories are contemplated. Much as Seeliger envisaged, the smooth massless limit indicates underdetermination of theories by data between massless and massive scalar gravities---indeed an unconceived alternative. At least one version easily could have been developed before General Relativity; it then would have motivated thinking of Einstein's equations along the lines of Einstein's newly re-appreciated "physical strategy" and particle physics and would have suggested a rivalry from massive spin 2 variants of General Relativity. The Putnam-Grünbaum debate on conventionality is revisited with an emphasis on the broad modal scope of conventionalist views. Massive scalar gravity thus contributes to a historically plausible rational reconstruction of much of 20th-21st century space-time philosophy in the light of particle physics. An appendix reconsiders the Malament-Weatherall-Manchak conformal restriction of conventionality and constructs the 'universal force' influencing the causal structure. Subsequent works will discuss how massive gravity could have provided a template for a more Kant-friendly space-time theory that would have blocked Moritz Schlick's supposed refutation of synthetic _a priori_ knowledge, and how Einstein's false analogy between the Neumann-Seeliger-Einstein modification of Newtonian gravity and the cosmological constant \Lambda generated lasting confusion that obscured massive gravity as a conceptual possibility. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hard Times:Philosophy and the Fundamentalist ImaginationRandall Everett Allsup"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and (...) this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to the Facts!" So admonishes headmaster Gradgrind in the very beginning of Hard Times, Charles Dickens' prescient tale of education in the industrial world.1 Facts—"addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, settle everything somehow and never wonder"—Facts form the essence of Gradgrind's philosophy.2A close reading of Gradgrind's opening monologue will provide the starting off point for an examination of the role and place of philosophy in the music curriculum. I am particularly intrigued by the question Reimer posed in his opening. He asked us to consider, Who is philosophy of music education for? We will return to this question at the close of this brief reflection.For the moment, however, I would like to continue on to the second paragraph of Hard Times, where Dickens does something very interesting. Following Gradgrind's inglorious monologue, he casts the scene of a small schoolroom, a "plain, bare, monotonous vault."3 Headmaster Gradgrind stands in front; he is described with a "square wall of a forehead," his mouth is "wide, thin, and hard set," his voice "inflexible and dry."4 His hair "bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside."5 A square wall of a forehead, a lumpy head like the crust of a plum pie: these words give us more than "hard Facts"—they are more than mere descriptors. It seems that Dickens, through metaphor, mood, dynamic contrast—through the aesthetic imagination—has imbedded a quiet rebuke to the bold commonsense of Facts.The Gradgrind philosophy finds easy parallel to current thinking in American education. In the fundamentalist imagination, sources of ambiguity must be rooted out—basic skills make adults out of reasoning animals. "Children should be tested on basic reading and math skills every year, between grades three and eight. Measuring is the only way to know whether all our children are learning—and I want to know, because I refuse to leave any child behind."6 The speaker, of course, is George W. Bush whose call to basic skills and episodic testing appeals [End Page 139] to our sense of reason. Like Gradgrind suggests, it is the principle on which we brought up our own children, and this is the principle on which we will bring up today's children. Such a philosophy of education proudly combines folk beliefs about teaching and learning with the hard science of thorough assessment.The President further recommends that our children "must also be educated in the values of our civil society. Some people think it's inappropriate to make moral judgments anymore. Not me. We must be willing to draw a clear line between right and wrong. Those clear lines must be supported by political leaders, public schools, and our public institutions. Educating our children about their moral and civil responsibilities will serve them—and the nation—every bit as well as the academic learning they require."7 In addition to discipline-based standards of knowledge, Facts (in this view) govern the rules of citizenship, provide moral clarity, and as we will see shortly, inform the aesthetic. It is worth noting that such a linear equation—those clear straight lines—currently places skeptics in the category of unpatriotic, miseducative, and morally corrupt.8The fundamentalist philosophy of education is a governing philosophy—it is a philosophy for, not with, its initiates. Judgments are passed, not reached; answers are given, not argued. Teachers in this setting—whether willing accomplices or not—define what needs to be known and... (shrink)

The paper focuses on the character of the literary and contends that if, instead of accepting the legitimacy of the question “what is literature?” and trying to answer it, one were to subject the question itself to a critical scrutiny—i.e. in order to lay bare what the question presupposes about the literary—it becomes obvious that any attempt to answer the question by uncritically accepting the legitimacy of the puzzle it puts forward can only give rise to contradictions. For the question (...) requires and presupposes for an answer an ontologically independent foundation, and the latter, given its immutability, requires the positing of a reality/representation disjunction—where the latter of the pair permits of and accommodates the experience of change—thereby ensuring that representation, too, requires a foundation, which, due to the impossibility of a foundation being the foundation of its other, that is, mutability, ends up undermining the very possibility of a disjunction, and, hence, the coherence of the foundationalist enterprise. Given that the problem of incoherence is bound to recur in all attempts to explain the literary in a foundationalist framework and given that the logic of foundationalism is one with the logic of nihilism—for the incoherence necessitates the denial of the possibility of literature—a release from the contradictions and a reinstatement of the reality of literature can come about only if one is awakened to the incoherence of the foundationalist undertaking. The resulting turn away from foundationalist thinking to differential thinking—where the incoherence of the demand for coherence is grasped and the reality of time reinstated—sheds light on the twining of the destinies of the literary and the philosophical: if philosophy as differential thinking awakens us to the displacement of being in the flow of time, literature sets into work the displacement of meaning in the functioning of language. This confirms that not only are the attempts to unearth a ground for the literary a mistake, but denying the reality of the literary event—i.e. upon failing to find a ground—is equally a mistake. (shrink)

This essay is an elaboration on some central themes and arguments from my recent book, Chronopathologies: Time and Politics in Deleuze, Derrida, Phenomenology and Analytic Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield 2012). There is hence an element of generality to this essay that the book itself is better able to justify. But a short programmatic piece has its own virtues, especially for those of us who are time poor (which is pretty much everyone in contemporary academia). Moreover, it adds (...) a dimension to the above book by more explicitly situating it in relation to what is an emerging view in some recent scholarship (such as John McCumber, Len Lawlor, David Hoy, and before this Liz Grosz) that time is central to the identity of continental philosophy, as well as considering some of the work that in different ways contests this kind of interpretation of the identity of continental philosophy (e.g. Simon Glendinning, and, tacitly, Paul Redding). In continuing to side with the former over the latter, I will also develop my argument that time is one of the most significant factors in the divided house that I think contemporary philosophy remains, and I conclude by offering a series of negative prescriptions regarding how we might better avoid particular chronopathologies, or time-sicknesses, that are endemic to these philosophical trajectories, and that are also present (to greater and lesser degrees) in the majority of individual philosophers standardly labelled analytic and continental. To the extent that such sicknesses are at least partly inevitable, akin to a transcendental illusion, this paper consists in a call to be more attentive to this tendency, and to the methodological, metaphilosophical, and ethico-political consequences that follow from them. (shrink)

We are currently seeing dramatic changes in the ways we imagine and experience time. Permanent debt, unending violent conflict, climate change, economic instability, and widening social inequalities have led to suggestions that we are now living in the time of the 'end times'. In the shadow of a foreshortened future, the present is increasingly experienced as a form of 'non-stop inertia', resulting in experiences of time as both frenetic but also stuck - revving up, as Ivor Southwood (...) puts it, to go nowhere. So, where do we go and how when all options seem to have run their course and time is no longer moving forward? Enduring Time proposes some alternative relations of time which provide hopeful alternatives to the dominating models of oppression, limitation and exploitation. A strikingly original philosophy of time which also provides students and scholars with a rigorous and detailed survey of contemporary theories of time, Enduring Time is an indispensable read for those attempting to live meaningfully in the current age. (shrink)

Many philosophy majors are shocked by the gap between the relative ease of lower-level philosophy courses and the difficulty of upper-division courses. This book serves as a necessary bridge to upper-level study in philosophy by offering rigorous but concise and accessible accounts of basic concepts and distinctions that are used throughout the discipline. It serves as a valuable advanced introduction to any undergraduate who is moving into upper-level courses in philosophy. While lower-level introductions to philosophy (...) usually deal with popular topics accessible to the general student in a piecemeal fashion, The Philosophy Major's Introduction to Philosophy offers coverage of important general philosophical concepts, tools, and devices that may be used for a long time to come in various philosophical areas. The volume is helpfully divided between a focus on the relation between language and the world in the first three chapters and coverage of mental content in the final two chapters, but builds a coherent narrative from start to finish. It also provides ample study questions and helpful sign-posts throughout, making it a must-have for any student attempting to engage fully with the problems and arguments in philosophy. Key Features Integrates topics from various areas of philosophy, such as philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical logic Provides descriptions of logico-mathematical tools necessary for philosophical studies, such as propositional logic, predicate logic, modal logic, set theory, mereology, and mathematical functions Makes connections with modern philosophy, including discussions of Descartes's skepticism and dualism, Locke's theory of personal identity, Hume's theory of causation, and Kant's synthetic a priori. Includes well-known entertaining puzzles and thought experiments such as the Ship of Theseus, the Statue and the Clay, a Brain in a Vat, and Twin Earth Lists helpful Exercise Questions and Discussion Questions at the end of each chapter and answers selected questions at the back of the book. (shrink)

The first part (“Is there a future?”), discusses the idea of the future in the context of Carl Schmitt’s vision for the spatial revolutions of modernity, and then the idea of Anthropocene, as a synonym for an environmental crisis endangering the very survival of humankind. From this point of view, the conquest of space and the colonization of Mars at the center of futuristic and technocratic visions appear to be an attempt to escape from human responsibilities on Earth. The second (...) part (“AI and other hyperobjects”) discusses the extent of intellectual hubris expressed in computation, AI (Garvin Minsky e Ray Kurzweil), and the philosophy of computing and information (Eric Fredkin), involved in the elaboration of new theoretical assessments on the ultimate nature of reality. Their vision is then contrasted and made to interact with that of philosopher Timothy Morton. He has taken the perspective of global warming and the possibility of ecological catastrophe seriously, avoiding all the futuristic enthusiasms and instead emphasizing the radical nature of the transformations that humans experience in the present. In this perspective, AI becomes one of the “hyperobjects,” like the Internet or climate change, in which humans are immersed. Morton’s hyperobjects delineate an uncanny view of the future; this uncanniness is not related to the supernatural but to the environment. The third section (“More-than-human-humanism”) further reflects on the “uncanniness” that human perceive in the encounters with the manifestations of hyperobjects. It also seeks to understand the human position in the face of the radical technological transformations induced by cybernetics and AI. This section discusses Anti-humanism, Transhumanism, and Posthumanism within the broader category of more-than-human thought, which seems to be a more appropriate term to clarify the possible misunderstandings induced by the word “posthuman” and “transhuman.” The central question is not to empower (Transhumanism) or disempower (Posthumanism) humans, but to see them in relation to what is not human, including other animals, the environment, and the machine. The analysis considers the works of Cary Wolfe, Jane Bennet, Bryant Levi, among others, and introduces ethical debates on cyborgs, robots, and Autonomous weapons systems (AWS). The fourth section (“Ethical Perspectives”) continues this inquiry, concentrating on the non-standard ethical theories of Luciano Floridi (Computer and Information Ethics) and David Gunkel (The question of the Machine). It examines the opportunity and feasibility of including in the discussion on the ethics of our time - characterized by the pervasiveness of AI - the notions of consciousness as theorized by Emmanuel Levinas’s Humanism of the Other and Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another. Finally, the last section (“The time of the end?”) reflects on how the hyperobject, Anthropocene, re-establishes a sense of limits in human history and confirms the special responsibility of human beings, and supports the need for a more-than-human-humanism. The latter, in other words, means intertwining ourselves with a unique ecosystem which cannot be overlooked and which restores meaning to our relationship with the past, present, and future. The awareness of the current challenges of technology can and must express itself in different forms of resistance to the adverse effects of AI in our lives. The ethical approach based on the persisting role of human consciousness is essential, but it must be coupled with human decision-making and political action. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to introduce philosophers of science to some recent philosophical discussions of the nature and origin of the direction of time. The essay is organized around books by Hans Reichenbach, Paul Horwich, and Huw Price. I outline their major arguments and treat certain critical points in detail. I speculate at the end about the ways in which the subject may continue to develop and in which it may connect with other areas of philosophy.

Is a policy-friendly philosophy of science possible? In order to respond this question, I consider a particular instance of contemporary philosophy of science, the semantic view of scientific theories, by placing it in the broader methodological landscape of the integration of philosophy of science into STS (Science and Technology Studies) as a component of the overall contribution of the latter to science policy. In that context, I defend a multi-disciplinary methodological integration of the special discipline composing STS (...) against a reductionist interdisciplinary unification, arguing that if STS wants to contribute to policy advising by constructing narratives of science practice feasible for science policy both in terms of descriptive completeness and intelligibility, then it must avoid the explanatory reductionism tendencies of special disciplines in interdisciplinary contexts. This would favour, at the same time, a relaxation of esoteric language. On this basis, it seems that the semantic view is one right candidate among other approaches in the philosophy of science for facilitating the integration of the methodologically different contributions to STS toward policy objectives. In fact, besides offering a more realistic and descriptively complete picture of science practice with respect to its predecessor in the philosophy of science, namely the syntactic view, the semantic view is also able to capture some aspects of science practice that elude even sociological approaches to STS, thus inviting different perspective on the same subject matter. (shrink)

Branching-time temporal logics have proved to be an extraordinarily successful tool in the formal specification and verification of distributed systems. Much of their success stems from the tractability of the model checking problem for the branching time logic CTL, which has made it possible to implement tools that allow designers to automatically verify that systems satisfy requirements expressed in CTL. Recently, CTL was generalised by Alur, Henzinger, and Kupferman in a logic known as Alternating-time Temporal Logic (ATL). (...) The key insight in ATL is that the path quantifiers of CTL could be replaced by cooperation modalities, of the form , where is a set of agents. The intended interpretation of an ATL formula is that the agents can cooperate to ensure that holds (equivalently, that have a winning strategy for ). In this paper, we extend ATL with knowledge modalities, of the kind made popular in the work of Fagin, Halpern, Moses, Vardi and colleagues. Combining these knowledge modalities with ATL, it becomes possible to express such properties as group can cooperate to bring about iff it is common knowledge in that . The resulting logic — Alternating-time Temporal Epistemic Logic (ATEL) — shares the tractability of model checking with its ATL parent, and is a succinct and expressive language for reasoning about game-like multiagent systems. (shrink)

This paper argues that we can see our lives as a snapshot happening now or as a moving picture extending across time. These dual ways of seeing our lives inform how we conceive of the problem of age group justice. A snapshot view sees age group justice as an interpersonal problem between distinct age groups. A moving picture view sees age group justice as a first-person problem of prudential choice. This paper explores these different ways of thinking about age (...) group justice and illustrates them using a principle of respect for human dignity, understood in terms of reasonable support for floor level central human capabilities at each stage of life. I argue that different frames are suitable for different kinds of decisions, and each provides a true, but partial, picture of aging and age group justice. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 7, Page 1014-1034, September 2022. The plural, impure or discordant nature of time has become an important theme in recent critical social and political theory. Against Althusser’s dismissal of Sartre’s presumedly Hegelian understanding of time and history, this article establishes Jean-Paul Sartre as a key figure in this debate on the plurality of temporalities. Especially in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre understands history and the social in terms of a (...) multiplicity of uneven and non-synchronous temporalisations, rejecting an notion of time as a universal container within which events take place. The originality of Sartre’s approach is that it establishes a link between the notion of the plurality of temporalities and the problem of freedom and domination. His mature social and political theory allows us to understand temporalisation as a strategy for domination, and objective social temporality as key to a form of anonymous or structural domination. A reconstruction of this highly complex and sophisticated approach to thinking domination through time can also shed an original light on the temporal dimension of democracy and totalitarianism. (shrink)

This book examines issues related to the concepts of space, time and causality in the context of modern physics and ancient Indian traditions. It looks at the similarity and convergence of these concepts of modern physics with those discussed in ancient Indian wisdom. The volume brings the methodologies of empiricism and introspection together to highlight the synergy between these two strands. It discusses wide-ranging themes including the quantum vacuum as ultimate reality, quantum entanglement and metaphysics of relations, identity and (...) individuality, and dark energy and anti-matter as discussed in physics and in Indian philosophical schools like Vedanta, Yoga, Buddhist, Kashmiri Shaivism and Jaina Philosophy. First of its kind, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researches of philosophy, Indian philosophy, philosophy of science, theoretical physics and social science. (shrink)

This article considers the state of philosophy of education in our current age and assesses prospects for the future of the field. I argue that as philosophers of education, we live in both the best of times and the worst of times. Developments in one key organisation, the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia, are examined in relation to broader international trends. Informed by the work of Pierre Hadot, I also reflect on what it might mean to talk (...) of philosophy of education as a way of life in the contemporary world. (shrink)

This article considers the state of philosophy of education in our current age and assesses prospects for the future of the field. I argue that as philosophers of education, we live in both the best of times and the worst of times. Developments in one key organisation, the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia, are examined in relation to broader international trends. Informed by the work of Pierre Hadot, I also reflect on what it might mean to talk (...) of philosophy of education as a way of life in the contemporary world. (shrink)

Mind, it has recently been argued1, is a thoroughly temporal phenomenon: so temporal, indeed, as to defy description and analysis using the traditional computational tools of cognitive scientific understanding. The proper explanatory tools, so the suggestion goes, are instead the geometric constructs and differential equations of Dynamical Systems Theory. I consider various aspects of the putative temporal challenge to computational understanding, and show that the root problem turns on the presence of a certain kind of causal web: a web that (...) involves multiple components (both inner and outer) linked by chains of continuous and reciprocal causal influence. There is, however, no compelling route from such facts about causal and temporal complexity to the radical anti- computationalist conclusion. This is because, interactive complexities notwithstanding, the computational approach provides a kind of explanatory understanding that cannot (I suggest) be recreated using the alternative resources of pure Dynamical Systems Theory. In particular, it provides a means of mapping information flow onto causal structure -- a mapping that is crucial to understanding the distinctive kinds of flexibility and control characteristic of truly mindful engagements with the world. Where we confront especially complex interactive causal webs, however, it does indeed become harder to isolate the syntactic vehicles required by the computational approach. Dynamical Systems Theory, I conclude, may play a vital role in recovering such vehicles from the burgeoning mass of real-time interactive complexity. (shrink)

The lived body has structures of ability built up over time through habit. Serious illness, injury, and incapacity can disrupt these capacities, and thereby, one’s relationship to the body, and to time itself. This paper focuses attention on a series of healing strategies individuals then employ on the “chessboard” of possibilities intrinsic to lived embodiment. This can include restoring past abilities (pointing to the future to recreate the past); and/or transforming one’s bodily structure or use-patterns, or the external (...) environment, to compensate. With many conditions, including progressive aging, no full rehabilitation is possible. Nevertheless, one can also seek consolation, richness, or hope by remembering the past; anticipating the future; or presencing, that is, living fully in the now. Insofar as past, present, and future are interwoven in one’s life experience, many also meet adversity by a life-story revision, constructing a new narrative to render events meaningful. Some also access a sense of transpersonal timelessness, whether through anticipation of an afterlife, or a sense of the eternal present. There is a literature on the adaptive coping mechanism used by the chronically ill, but with its diverse patient populations, methodologies, and categories, it has proved difficult to systematize. This article suggests that the structures of lived embodiment, as explored by phenomenology, provide a way to understand the modes of wholeness individuals access over time, and in relation to time—what is here termed chronic healing. (shrink)

Although Gilles Deleuze is one of France’s most celebrated twentieth-century philosophers, his theories of cinema have largely been ignored by American scholars. Film theorist D. N. Rodowick fills this gap by presenting the first comprehensive study, in any language, of Deleuze’s work on film and images. Placing Deleuze’s two books on cinema—_The Movement-Image _and _The Time-Image_—in the context of French cultural theory of the 1960s and 1970s, Rodowick examines the logic of Deleuze’s theories and the relationship of these theories (...) to his influential philosophy of difference. Rodowick illuminates the connections between Deleuze’s writings on visual and scientific texts and describes the formal logic of his theory of images and signs. Revealing how Deleuzian views on film speak to the broader network of philosophical problems addressed in Deleuze’s other books—including his influential work with Félix Guattari—Rodowick shows not only how Deleuze modifies the dominant traditions of film theory, but also how the study of cinema is central to the project of modern philosophy. (shrink)

Classical Philosophy is a comprehensive examination of early philosophy from the presocratics through to Aristotle. The aim of the book is to provide an explanation and analysis of the ideas that flourished at this time and considers their relevance both to the historical development of philosophy and to contemporary philosophy today. From these ideas we can see the roots of arguments in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and political philosophy. The book is arranged in four parts (...) by thinker and covers: The Presocratics Socrates Plato Aristotle Christopher Shields' style is inviting, refreshing and ideal for anyone coming to the subject for the first time. He provides a balanced account of the central topics and ideas that emerged from the period and includes helpful further reading and chapter overviews. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that lived time is anagrammatical. Anagrammatical time is a time that lands differently along race/gender/class lines. Its sens – its grammar – is rearranged by the context of its unfolding, at times effecting temporal harm while, at others, offering paths for temporal freedom. After introducing the notion of anagrammatical in part 1, in part 2, I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s notions of Stiftung and virtuality to account for the “nestedness” of anagrammatical time. (...) The past and present of anagrammatical time, I show, co-exist in the present diachronically. In part 3, I focus on temporal harm. I show how, in the context of the afterlife of slavery, the immemorial functions as a traumatic, compulsive-repetitive temporality, as a thief of time temporalizing with the felt necessity and determinacy of the future anterior. In part 4, I briefly turn to the temporal grammar of the “could have been” to think through temporal freedom. (shrink)

When men interplay with nature, they constitute with it the distinctive public time of a human realm. And when, as members of that realm, they combine with the nature that still remains outside the human realm, they constitute with it the distinctive public time of objective history. The time of history is thus less delimited, less specialized, and more inclusive than the time of the human realm.

A theory is usually said to be time reversible if whenever a sequence of states S 1 , S 2 , S 3 is possible according to that theory, then the reverse sequence of time reversed states S 3 T , S 2 T , S 1 T is also possible according to that theory; i.e., one normally not only inverts the sequence of states, but also operates on the states with a time reversal operator T . (...) David Albert and Paul Horwich have suggested that one should not allow such time reversal operations T on states. I will argue that time reversal operations on fundamental states should be allowed. I will furthermore argue that the form that time reversal operations take is determined by the type of fundamental geometric quantities that occur in nature and that we have good reason to believe that the fundamental geometric quantities that occur in nature correspond to irreducible representations of the Lorentz transformations. Finally, I will argue that we have good reason to believe that space-time has a temporal orientation. (shrink)

1. Introduction: Kairopolitics: The Politics of Realtime -- 2. Thought-Time: Immediacy and Live Theory -- 3. Control-Time: Immediacy and Constant Capitalism -- 4. Conclusion: Defense-Time: Immediacy and Realtime Resistance.

This paper brings together two theories that I have propounded separately elsewhere. The first is the view that concrete individuals are constituted completely by tropes, that they are trope bundles. The second and more recently developed theory is that of the two major categories of concrete individuals, continuants and occurrents, the latter are ontologically more basic than the former and that continuants are to be viewed as invariants among occurrents under equivalence relations. The latter theory embodies on its own an (...) account of the nature of identity through time of things that are in time but not extended in time. The question is whether this view is compatible with the trope bundle account of concrete particulars, and, assuming it is (both theories being separately attractive) whether bringing them together entails any modifications (other than complexity) to either theory. After examining likely metaphysical difficulties the tentative conclusion is that the attractiveness of the trope bundle theory persists despite the marriage, but that the mental picture of what tropes and trope bundles are must be overhauled. (shrink)

In _Time in the Ditch, _John McCumber explores the effect of McCarthyism on American philosophy in the 1940s and 1950s. The possibility that the political pressures of the McCarthy era might have skewed the development of the discipline has rarely been addressed in the subsequent half century. Why was silence maintained for so long? And what happens, McCumber asks, when political events and pressures go beyond interfering with individual careers to influence the nature of a discipline itself?

This collection highlights such issues as how the nature of time is relevant to the question of whether God is temporal and how God's other attributes are ...

A selection of lively debates in the philosophy of time that outline, defend and object to contemporary issues in metaphysics, consciousness and God.

_ Source: _Page Count 19 This article revisits Edmund Husserl’s philosophy of time in light of the modern standardisation of time. After assessing Husserl’s innovative analysis of the experience of time and raising key issues pertaining to his derivation of objective time from an originary ‘absolute flux of consciousness’, the article addresses potential relationships between this conception of time and the historically unique experience of time based in the rise of modern clock-time. (...) Drawing on insights from the literature within the sociology of time, the article concludes that Husserl’s conception of time both reproduces and rejects certain features of modern time relations. (shrink)

This collection of articles is an important milestone in the history of the study of time conceptions in Greek and Roman Antiquity. It spans from Homer to Neoplatonism. Conceptions of time are considered from different points of view and sources. Reflections on time were both central and various throughout the history of ancient philosophy. Time was a topic, but also material for poets, historians and doctors. Importantly, the contributions also explore implicit conceptions and how language (...) influences our thought categories. (shrink)

This article is about a start-up problem in scientific practice. Specifically, it is about the problem of justifying paleontological correlation—the practice of using fossils to establish time relations among fossiliferous rocks. Paleontological correlation was the key to assembling a geological timescale during the nineteenth century and remains an important practice in stratigraphic geology to this day. Yet contrary to philosophical expectations, this practice lacked a robust theoretical justification during the first half of the nineteenth century. This article examines what (...) this lack of justification amounted to, as well as how the method of paleontological correlation was justified in practice. (shrink)

In this study, Lynne Moss Bahr explores the concept of temporality as central to Jesus's proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Using insights from Continental philosophy on the messianic, which expose the false claim that time progresses in a linear continuum, Bahr presents these philosophical positions in critical dialogue with the sayings of Jesus regarding time and time's fulfillment. She shows how the Kingdom represents the possibilities of a disruption in time, one that reveals the (...) intrinsic relation between God and humanity. (shrink)

In what sense does time exist? Is it an objective feature of the external world? Or is its real nature dependent on the way man experiences it? Has modern science brought us closer to the answer to St. Augustine's exasperated outcry, 'What, then, is time?'? Ever since Aristotle, thinkers have been struggling with this most confounding and elusive of philosophical questions. How long does the present moment last? Can we make statements about the future that are clearly true (...) or clearly false? And if so, must we be fatalists? This volume presents twenty-three discussions of the problem of time. A section on classical and modern attempts at definition is followed by four groups of essays drawn largely from contemporary philosophy, each preface with an introduction by the editor. First, in a chapter entitled 'The Static versus the Dynamic Temporal', four philosophers advance solutions to McTaggart's famous proof of time's unreality. In the next two sections, the discussion turns to the meaning of the 'open future' and to the much-debated nature of 'human time'. Finally, modern science and philosophy tackle Zeno's celebrated paradoxes. The essays by Adolf Grnbaum, Nicholas Rescher, and William Barrett are published for the first time in this volume. (shrink)

Why does time seem to flow in one direction? Can we influence the past? Is only the present real? Does relativity conflict with our common understanding of time? How does time relate to free will? Could science do away with time? These questions and others about time are among the most puzzling problems in philosophy and science. In this exciting collection of original articles, eminent philosophers propose novel answers to these and other questions. Based (...) on the latest research in philosophy and physics, these essays will be enjoyable to anyone with a speculative turn of mind. (shrink)

The relationship between the photographic and optical images and time has been the subject of great deal of debate. Despite their differences, what many of these considerations have in common is their focus on the receiver, whether mechanical (the camera), biological (the eye–brain as the optical receiver), social or the memory and imagination of the observer. My aim here is to shift the emphasis from the receiver to the object or vista that is photographed or viewed and to explore (...) how the constraints implied by our modern understanding of the Universe, concerning space and time, impact on the way we perceive photographic and optical images. Viewed from this perspective, photographs can be treated as light projections of sections of the four-dimensional observable world onto two-dimensional spatial photographic or viewing surfaces. I shall show that despite the severe reduction that such projections imply, these modern considerations have the important consequence of bestowing a complex temporality upon optical images, including photographs. This realization dramatically changes the way we view photographs. I give examples of this rich temporality through considerations of terrestrial images – and more significantly images of the Sky, where these temporal effects are far more pronounced. (shrink)

This book is the first comprehensive attempt to explain Ibn ‘Arabî’s distinctive view of time and its role in the process of creating the cosmos and its relation with the Creator. By comparing this original view with modern theories of physics and cosmology, Mohamed Haj Yousef constructs a new cosmological model that may deepen and extend our understanding of the world, while potentially solving some of the drawbacks in the current models such as the historical Zeno's paradoxes of motion (...) and the recent Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox (EPR) that underlines the discrepancies between Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. (shrink)

What is the nature of temporal passage—the movement of events or moments of time from the future through the present into the past? Is the future and the past as real as the present, or is the present—or perhaps the present and the past—all that exists? What role, if any, does language play in giving us an insight into temporal reality? Is it possible to travel through time into distant regions of the future or the past? What accounts (...) for the direction of time, the sense we have that we are moving toward the future and not back into the past? What is the relation between the physics of time and the philosophy of time? These are the kind of dizzying questions that have been addressed by metaphysicians since antiquity, and time has remained a critical concept for many thinkers and philosophers since then (for instance, in his Confessions, St Augustine, restating an observation by Plotinus, wrote: ‘So what is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I seek to explain it, I do not’). Interest in the subject has also been enduring—and has blossomed anew in the past century. The Philosophy of Time is a new title in the Routledge series, Critical Concepts in Philosophy. It meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the subject’s vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by L. Nathan Oaklander, a leading scholar in the philosophy of time, this new Major Work from Routledge brings together in four volumes the canonical and the very best cutting-edge scholarship in the field to provide a synoptic view of all the key issues and current debates. With a comprehensive introduction to the collection, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, The Philosophy of Time is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by philosophers of time—as well as those working in related areas of philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion—as a vital research resource. (shrink)

Philosophy: Dissent and Nonconformity forms part of the Doctrine and Devotion trilogy. The book represents the first attempt to tell the story of those who taught and wrote philosophy outside the Anglican-Oxbridge Academy. Dr. Sell investigates the place give to philosophy in Dissenting academies and Nonconformist colleges between 1689 and 1920. During this time there were over one hundred such academies and colleges and he examines each of them in turn. The beliefs and views held by (...) the philosophers are also examined in detail. This is both an important and an engaging book on a fascinating subject, and will appeal to those interested in nonconformist history and the history of philosophy in academic institutions. (shrink)

In what sense does time exist? Is it an objective feature of the external world? Or is its real nature dependent on the way man experiences it? Has modern science brought us closer to the answer to St. Augustine's exasperated outcry, 'What, then, is time?' ? Ever since Aristotle, thinkers have been struggling with this most confounding and elusive of philosophical questions. How long does the present moment last? Can we make statements about the future that are clearly (...) true or clearly false? And if so, must we be fatalists? This volume presents twenty-three discussions of the problem of time. A section on classical and modern attempts at definition is followed by four groups of essays drawn largely from contemporary philosophy, each preface with an introduction by the editor. First, in a chapter entitled 'The Static versus the Dynamic Temporal', four philosophers advance solutions to McTaggart's famous proof of time's unreality. In the next two sections, the discussion turns to the meaning of the 'open future' and to the much-debated nature of 'human time'. Finally, modern science and philosophy tackle Zeno's celebrated paradoxes. The essays by Adolf Grnbaum, Nicholas Rescher, and William Barrett are published for the first time in this volume. (shrink)