In this book, fifteen authors from a wide spectrum of disciplines (ranging from the natural sciences to the arts) offer assessments of the way time enters their work, the definition and uses of time that have proved most productive or problematic, and the lessons their subjects can offer for our understanding of time beyond the classroom and laboratory walls. The authors have tried, without sacrificing analytical rigour, to make their contribution accessible to a cross-disciplinary readership. Each chapter reviews time's past (...) and present application in its respective field, considers the practical and logical problems that remain, and assesses the methods researchers are using to escape or resolve them. Particular attention is paid to ways in which the technical treatment of time, for problem-solving and model-building around specific phenomena, call on - or clash with - our intuitive perceptions of what time is and does. The spans of time considered range from the fractions of seconds it takes unstable particles to disintegrate to the millions of years required for one species to give way to another. Like all central conceptual words, time is understood on several levels. By inviting input from a broad range of disciplines, the book aims to provide a fuller understanding of those levels, and of the common ground that lurks at their base. Much agreement emerges - not only on the nature of the problems time presents to modern intellectual thought, but also on the clues that recent discoveries may offer towards possible solutions. (shrink)

Much of ordinary memory is autobiographical; memory of what one saw and did, where and when. It may derive from your own past experiences, or from what other people told you about your past life. It may be phenomenologically rich, redolent of that autumn afternoon so long ago, or a few austere reports of what happened. But all autobiographical memory is first-person memory, stateable using ‘I’. It is a memory you would express by saying, ‘I remember I . . .’.

Now available in an updated addition: ""Integrating concepts of time derived from the physical sciences and world religions, "The Becoming of Time" examines ...

A research professor of nuclear physics explores the mysterious essence of time in its two aspects---one of accurate measurement, the other of human sensation-- ...

Darwinian matters : life, force and change -- Biological difference -- The evolution of sex and race -- Nietzsche's Darwin -- History and the untimely -- The eternal return and the overman -- Bergsonian differences -- The philosophy of life -- Intuition and the virtual -- The future.

Although the equally pervasive and abstract concept of space has generated a vast body of disciplines, time, and the related idea of "becoming" (transforming, ...

... or engenders a tradition of philosophical reflection, questions will arise about the relation between divine knowledge and power and human freedom. ...

Time and the body -- Time and the mind -- Time and culture -- Time in our time.

In this paper I show that the existence of an infinite temporal regress does not undermine the soundness of Craigs version of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. To this end I shall focus on a particular complication that Craig raises against one of his arguments in support of a finite temporal regress. I will show that this complication can be made innocuous by extending the notion of A-theoretic time, which is presupposed by Craigs argument, to include a notion of temporal becoming (...) that is compatible with the existence of an infinite regress of temporal events. All this shows that God could have created an infinite temporal regress a finite time in the past without this entailing a contradiction. (shrink)

[I] Introduction The Western religions all claim that God is eternal. This claim finds strong expression in the Old Testament, which is common property of ...

Godel's and Tarski's theorems were inspired by paradoxes: the Richard paradox, the Liar. Godel, in the 1951 Gibbs lecture argued from his metatheoretical results for a metaphysical claim: the impossibility of reducing, both, mathematics to the knowable by the human mind and the human mind to a finite machine (e.g. the brain). So Godel reasoned indirectly from paradoxes for metaphysical theses. I present four metaphysical theses concerning mechanism, reductive physicalism and time for the only purpose of suggesting how it could (...) be argued for them directly from paradoxical sentences. (shrink)

This article argues that the causal loops that occur in some time-travel scenarios and in certain solutions of the theory of relativity are no more mysterious than the infinitely descending causal chains familiar from Newtonian mechanics.

Must there have been a First Event in the history of the universe? Or might it be the case that something or other (maybe something very small) has always existed? Aquinas famously held that this question could not be settled by natural reas on–that without divine revelation we would have no way of knowing that God created the world out of nothing finitely many years ago. But other medieval theologians, less under the sway of Aristotle, rejected this view of the (...) matter. According to these thi nkers, it could be proved that the universe had a beginning in time. And to their way of thinking, this provided the crucial premise for a very simple demonstration of God's existence–or at least of the existence of a First Cause that brought the u niverse into existence finitely many years ago. (shrink)

In this essay, I first set out the principles of change, paying particular attention to the need for a support for all changes and to the need for prime matter. I then discuss the nature of time, arguing that time is not actually composed of durationless instants but that instants can be understood as limits to an infinite process of potential division. I then give a definition of instants in terms of intervals and propose a way of modeling them. In (...) the next section I bring together the two previous sections by explaining change as an instantaneous process that does not involve actual instants. In the final section I draw out a larger metaphysical moral that emphasizes the role of potentiality and sees the potentiality in change and the potentiality in time as but different aspects of the same radical potentiality in nature. (shrink)

At p.23, Leftow argues that, as a matter of physical necessity, no parcel of matter follows a discontinuous spatial path. He then uses this conclusion as a premise in a further argument to the conclusion that no non-theistic scenarios involving contingently existing entities could yield a sure way to gain evidence that a second time series exists. I think that there may be non-theistic scenarios involving contingently existing entities which yield ways of gaining evidence of other time series -- it (...) could be for example that our best theories about the very early universe entail that there are many disconnected regions of spacetime, each with its own time series -- so I think that the further argument cannot be any good. However, the point I want to insist on here is that his argument for the conclusion that, as a matter of physical necessity no parcel of matter follows a discontinuous spatial path, is seriously flawed. (shrink)

This volume presents selected essays from the 13th triennial conference of the International Society for the Study of Time: "Time: Limits and Constraints.