The papers in this volume reflect much of the current unease of a world that perceives itself once more at the edge of chaos. The authors present different vistas of that experience and their inherent dialectic, expressed in numerous and ceaseless conflicts between ordering and disordering processes. They can be read as comments on the ongoing processes that lead toward greater complexity.

Examines the relationship between time and sexual difference in the work of French feminists Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. This book is the first to examine the relationship between time and sexual difference in the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Because of their association with reproduction, embodiment, and the survival of the species, women have been confined to the cyclical time of nature—a temporal model that is said to merely repeat itself. Men, on the other (...) hand, have been seen as bearers of linear time and as capable of change and progress. Fanny Söderbäck argues that both these temporal models make change impossible because they either repeat or repress the past. The model of time developed here—revolutionary time—aims at returning to and revitalizing the past so as to make possible a dynamic-embodied present and a future pregnant with change. Söderbäck stages an unprecedented conversation between Kristeva and Irigaray on issues of both time and difference, and engages thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, and Plato along the way. “Revolutionary Time makes a distinctive contribution to contemporary feminist and continental philosophical thought. By engaging Kristeva and Irigaray in depth alongside one another, and making time the guiding thread for reading their work, the author generates insights that are not to be found elsewhere in the existing literature. Through its development of the concept of revolutionary time, the book offers rich resources for thinking about temporalization in its existential, ontological, and political dimensions, in ways that are particularly valuable for feminist projects of change and political transformation.” — Rachel Jones, author of Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy. (shrink)

Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time offers an innovative philosophical account of the most fundamental kinds of time representation.

Examining Levinas's critique of the Heideggerian conception of temporality, this book shows how the notion of the feminine both enables and prohibits the most fertile territory of Levinas's thought. The author suggests that though Levinas's conception of subjectivity corrects some of the problems Heidegger's philosophy introduces, such as his failure to deal adequately with ethics, Levinas creates new stumbling blocks, notably the confining role he accords to the feminine. For Levinas, the feminine functions as that which facilitates but is excluded (...) from the ethical relation that he sees as the pinnacle of philosophy. Showing that the feminine is a strategic part of Levinas's philosophy, but one that was not thought through by him, the author suggests that his failure to solidly place the feminine in his thinking is structurally consonant with his conceptual separation of politics from ethics. (shrink)

This is a study of the nature of time. In it, redeploying an argument first presented by McTaggart, the author argues that although time itself is real, tense is not. He accounts for the appearance of the reality of tense - our sense of the passage of time, and the fact that our experience occurs in the present - by showing how time is indispensable as a condition of action. Time itself is further analysed, and (...) Dr Mellor gives answers to most of the metaphysical questions it provokes, concerning the relation of time to space, the dissection of time, and its relation to change and causation. (shrink)

The existential analysis -- The death of dasein -- The timeliness of dasein -- The derivation of time -- The time of being.

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can (...) happen can just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students. Table of Contents: Preface 1. Time-Reversal Invariance 2. Thermodynamics 3. Statistical Mechanics 4. The Reversibility Objections and the Past-Hypothesis 5. The Scope of Thermodynamics 6. The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention 7. Quantum Mechanics Appendix: Gedankenexperiments with Heat Engines Index Reviews of this book: The foundations of statistical mechanisms are often presented in physics textbooks in a rather obscure and confused way. By challenging common ways of thinking about this subject, Time and Chance can do quite a lot to improve this situation. --Jean Bricmont, Science Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own...It has a surgical precision...and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn. --Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University As usual with Albert's work, the exposition is brisk and to the point, and exceptionally clear...The book will be an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of philosophical issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a literature which has been thin on the ground but is now growing as it deserves to. --Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan. (shrink)

In a quantum universe with a strong arrow of time, it is standard to postulate that the initial wave function started in a particular macrostate---the special low-entropy macrostate selected by the Past Hypothesis. Moreover, there is an additional postulate about statistical mechanical probabilities according to which the initial wave function is a ''typical'' choice in the macrostate. Together, they support a probabilistic version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: typical initial wave functions will increase in entropy. Hence, there are (...) two sources of randomness in such a universe: the quantum-mechanical probabilities of the Born rule and the statistical mechanical probabilities of the Statistical Postulate. I propose a new way to understand time's arrow in a quantum universe. It is based on what I call the Thermodynamic Theories of Quantum Mechanics. According to this perspective, there is a natural choice for the initial quantum state of the universe, which is given by not a wave function but by a density matrix. The density matrix plays a microscopic role: it appears in the fundamental dynamical equations of those theories. The density matrix also plays a macroscopic / thermodynamic role: it is exactly the projection operator onto the Past Hypothesis subspace. Thus, given an initial subspace, we obtain a unique choice of the initial density matrix. I call this property "the conditional uniqueness" of the initial quantum state. The conditional uniqueness provides a new and general strategy to eliminate statistical mechanical probabilities in the fundamental physical theories, by which we can reduce the two sources of randomness to only the quantum mechanical one. I also explore the idea of an absolutely unique initial quantum state, in a way that might realize Penrose's idea of a strongly deterministic universe. (shrink)

Over 200 health journals call on the United Nations, political leaders, and health professionals to recognize that climate change and biodiversity loss are one indivisible crisis and must be tackle...

"For description and defense of the narrative configurations of everyday life, and of the practical and social character of those narratives, there is no better treatment than Time, Narrative, and History.... a clear, judicious, and truthful account, provocative from beginning to end." —Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology "... a superior work of philosophy that tells a unique and insightful story about narrative." —Quarterly Journal of Speech.

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the ...

For critical legal scholars, the ongoing far-right assault upon the liberal status quo poses a distinct dilemma. On the one hand, the desire to condemn the far-right is overwhelming. On the other hand, such condemnations are susceptible to being appropriated as a validation of the very liberalism that critical theorists have long questioned. In seeking to transcend this dilemma, my focus is on the discourse of ‘white genocide’ — a commonplace belief amongst the far-right/white nationalists that ‘whites’, as a discrete (...) group, are facing demographic destruction as a result of deliberate policy choices. Such a belief has motivated acts of extreme violence. While libel to dismissal by experts on mainstream understandings of genocide, namely international criminal lawyers, I argue that this ‘white genocide’ discourse deserves careful scrutiny as a jurisprudential and socio-legal phenomenon that reveals key weaknesses in present modalities of liberal justification. Drawing upon an array of recent critical theories, I show how a liberalism unable to face its own decline enables the very far-right assertions it purports to oppose. Thus, given liberalism’s failure to act as a neutral arbiter, an alternative approach for those opposing the far-right is to develop a vision of politics and society that confront believers in ‘white genocide’ on a more substantive level. This, I argue, forces the far-right’s opponents to disavow liberal scepticism towards utopian transformation as well as the juridical understandings and institutions that allow this scepticism to durably persist. (shrink)

I advocate Time-Slice Rationality, the thesis that the relationship between two time-slices of the same person is not importantly different, for purposes of rational evaluation, from the relationship between time-slices of distinct persons. The locus of rationality, so to speak, is the time-slice rather than the temporally extended agent. This claim is motivated by consideration of puzzle cases for personal identity over time and by a very moderate form of internalism about rationality. Time-Slice Rationality (...) conflicts with two proposed principles of rationality, Conditionalization and Reflection. Conditionalization is a diachronic norm saying how your current degrees of belief should fit with your old ones, while Reflection is a norm enjoining you to defer to the degrees of belief that you expect to have in the future. But they are independently problematic and should be replaced by improved, time-slice-centric principles. Conditionalization should be replaced by a synchronic norm saying what degrees of belief you ought to have given your current evidence and Reflection should be replaced by a norm which instructs you to defer to the degrees of belief of agents you take to be experts. These replacement principles do all the work that the old principles were supposed to do while avoiding their problems. In this way, Time-Slice Rationality puts the theory of rationality on firmer foundations and yields better norms than alternative, non-time-slice-centric approaches. (shrink)

Time is a traditional theme in philosophy and a fundamental theme in psychoanalysis. The wealth of studies devoted to the former contrasts strikingly with their scarcity in the latter.

This article provides a non-technical overview of the conflict between the special theory of relativity and the dynamic theories of time. The chief argument against dynamic theories of time from relativistic mechanics is presented. The space of current responses to that argument is subsequently mapped.