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.

The growing interest in fragmentalism is one of the most exciting trends in philosophy of time and is gradually reshaping the contemporary debate. Providing an extensive interpretation of this view, Samuele Iaquinto and Giuliano Torrengo articulate a novel theory of the passage of time and argue that it is the most effective in vindicating the inherent dynamism of reality. Iaquinto and Torrengo offer the first full-range application of fragmentalism to a number of metaphysical topics, including the open future, (...) causation, the A-theoretic interpretation of special relativity and time travel. The resulting picture, they argue, conveys the potential of a radically new understanding of time. (shrink)

Quentin Smith offers powerful arguments against the New Theory of Reference propounded by leading thhinkers in the philosophy of language. Smith defends the tensed theory of time and argues that the simultaneity is absoltue, basing this position on the theory that all propositions exist in time. Using detailed propostitions and a theory of cognitive significance, he introduces an alternative interpretation of reference that will be relevant to metaphysicians, philosophers of science and philosophers of language and may come to (...) be recognised as the definitive statement on the tensed theory of time. (shrink)

This book offers a defense of the tensed theory of time, a critique of the New Theory of Reference, and an argument that simultaneity is absolute. Although Smith rejects ordinary language philosophy, he shows how it is possible to argue from the nature of language to the nature of reality. Specifically, he argues that semantic properties of tensed sentences are best explained by the hypothesis that they ascribe to events temporal properties of futurity, presentness, or pastness and do not (...) merely ascribe relations of earlier than or simultaneity. He criticizes the New Theory of Reference, which holds that "now" refers directly to a time and does not ascribe the property of presentness. Smith does not adopt the old or Fregean theory of reference but develops a third alternative, based on his detailed theory of de re and de dicto propositions and a theory of cognitive significance. He concludes the book with a lengthy critique of Einstein's theory of time. Smith offers a positive argument for absolute simultaneity based on his theory that all propositions exist in time. He shows how Einstein's relativist temporal concepts are reducible to a conjunction of absolutist temporal concepts and relativist nontemporal concepts of the observable behavior of light rays, rigid bodies, and the like. (shrink)

Ulrich Meyer defends a novel theory about the nature of time, and argues against the consensus view that time and space are fundamentally alike. He presents the first comprehensive defense of a 'modal' account, which emphasizes the similarities between times and possible worlds in modal logic, and is easily reconciled with the theory of relativity.

In recent years, the EU legislation on genetically modified crops has come under severe criticism. Among the arguments are that the present legislation is inconsistent, disproportionate, obsolete from a scientific point of view, and vague in terms of its scope. In this paper, the EU GM legislation is analysed based on five proposed criteria: legal certainty, non-discrimination, proportionality, scientific adaptability, and inclusion of non-safety considerations. It is argued that the European regulatory framework does not at present satisfy the criteria of (...) legal certainty, non-discrimination, and scientific adaptability. Two ways of reforming the present legislation toward greater accommodation of the values expressed through the proposed criteria are briefly introduced and discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Necropolitical arrangements of bifurcations delineate those ontological antagonisms that code Blackness as ontological lack (as non-position). In this article, I attempt to think about this evacuation of being in terms of the necropolitical’s fleshy excess, as what Alexander Weheliye’s work names “habeus viscus.” In so doing, I explore the implications, for our understanding of the “repressed proximities” of which the necropolitical consists, of arrangements that always-already include entanglements with their fleshy excess. In other words, if the nonposition of the (...) excluded is always positioned within, then living in/against the death-logics of necropolitics is always happening from that “nonposition within.” Hence, a reading of Achille Mbembe’s account of necropolitics must reckon with what Katherine McKittrick names “the creative consequences of the plot and the plantation,” with the implications of the inextricable proximal entanglements between the killing of life and the living that persists, despite. This article focuses on this “living despite.” Through a constellation of thinkers like Katherine McKittrick, Alexander Weheliye, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (to name a few), it aims to show that there are, perhaps, other futures that are already “now,” shattering what Édouard Glissant refers to as the “stone of time,” shattering (necropolitical) history as destiny. (shrink)

Many metaphor theorists argue that our mental experience of time is grounded in our understanding of space, including motion through space. Results from recent experiments – in which people think about motion, which in turn influences their thinking about time – support this position. Still, many questions remain about the nature of the metaphorical connection between time and space. Can the mere suggestion of motion influence how people reason about time, and if so, when and how? (...) Three experiments investigated how thinking about “abstract” motion through sequences of numbers or letters would influence reasoning about time. Our results extend earlier psychological work on the link between time and space by showing that even motion in non-physical domains can influence temporal reasoning. The results provide further evidence that metaphorical understanding is grounded in our everyday physical and conceptual experience. (shrink)

Many have suggested that the transformation standardly referred to as `time reversal' in quantum theory is not deserving of the name. I argue on the contrary that the standard definition is perfectly appropriate, and is indeed forced by basic considerations about the nature of time in the quantum formalism.

Is what could have happened but never did as real as what did happen? What did happen, but isn't happening now, happened at another time. Analogously, one can say that what could have happened happens in another possible world. Whatever their views about the reality of such things as possible worlds, philosophers need to take this analogy seriously. Adriane Rini and Max Cresswell exhibit, in an easy step-by-step manner, the logical structure of temporal and modal discourse, and show that (...) every temporal construction has an exact parallel that requires a language that can refer to worlds, and vice versa. They make precise, in a way which can be articulated and tested, the claim that the parallel is at work behind even ordinary talk about time and modality. The book gives metaphysicians a sturdy framework for the investigation of time and modality - one that does not presuppose any particular metaphysical view. (shrink)

Flexibility in conceptual projection constitutes one of the most challenging issues in the embodiment and conceptual metaphor literatures. We sketch a theoretical proposal that places the burden of the explanation on attentional dynamics in interaction with mental models in working memory that are constrained to be maximally coherent. A test of this theory is provided in the context of the conceptual projection of time onto the domain of space. Participants categorized words presented at different spatial locations (back–front, left–right) as (...) referring to the past or to the future. Responses were faster when the irrelevant word location was congruent with the back–past, front–future metaphoric mapping. Moreover, when a new highly task-relevant spatial frame of reference was introduced, it changed the projection of past and future onto space in a way that was congruent with the new frame (past was now projected to left space and future to right space), as predicted by the theory. This study shows that there is substantial flexibility in conceptual projection and opens a venue to study metaphoric variation across tasks, individuals, and cultures as the result of attentional dynamics. (shrink)

This article examines the temporal dimension of contemporary architecture, particularly in light of the climate crisis. Mikhail Bakhtin’s category of “adventure-time” is redeployed to describe the general chronotope of postmodernism, one in which contingency and spatiotemporal disjunctions are dominant. In contrast, this essay argues for a new emphasis on duration as a means of attending to temporal continuity. Potential paths for expanding architecture’s critical engagement with duration are explored.

The present study traces and analyzes the ideas of linear time as depicted in some of the texts of the Ṛgveda, the Atharvaveda, the Kauṣītakibrāhmaṇa and the Mahābhārata, and as presented in the texts of early Buddhism. From the thread of fate, which is the path of man, narrative, identity, through the web woven by day and night or by the two goddesses of fate, through the web of sacrifice, to dependent origination in early Buddhism, all these images and (...) ideas are closely related with the notion of linear time. To go beyond this linear time, beyond the notion of LIFE IS A JOURNEY, is a penetration into the unspeakable, “into” the world beyond, “into” freedom. (shrink)

"In a wide-ranging discussion the author examines the philosophy of Kant, Heidegger, Adorno and Derrida and looks at the works of modernist and postmodernist artists such as Cezanne, Debussy and Boulez. Lyotard addresses issues such as time and memory, the sublime and the avant-garde, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Throughout his discussion he considers the close but problematic links between modernity, progress and humanity, and the transition to postmodernity. Lyotard claims that it is the task of literature, (...) philosophy and the arts to bear witness to and explain this difficult transition." "This important contribution to aesthetic and philosophical debates will be of great interest to students in philosophy, literary and cultural theory and politics."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

In this paper we develop a novel propositional semantics based on the framework of branching time. The basic idea is to replace the moment-history pairs employed as parameters of truth in the standard Ockhamist semantics by pairs consisting of a moment and a consistent, downward closed set of so-called transitions. Whereas histories represent complete possible courses of events, sets of transitions can represent incomplete parts thereof as well. Each transition captures one of the alternative immediate future possibilities open at (...) a branching point. The transition semantics exploits the structural resources a branching time structure has to offer and provides a fine-grained picture of the interrelation of modality and time. In addition to temporal and modal operators, a so-called stability operator becomes interpretable as a universal quantifier over the possible future extensions of a given transition set. The stability operator allows us to specify how and how far time has to unfold for the truth value of a sentence at a moment to become settled and enables a perspicuous treatment of future contingents. We show that the semantics developed along those lines generalizes and extends extant approaches: both Peirceanism and Ockhamism can be viewed as limiting cases of the transition approach that build on restricted resources only, and on both accounts, stability collapses into truth. (shrink)

"A discussion of the historical development of our ideas of time as they relate to nature, human nature and society. . . . The excellence of The Discovery of Time is unquestionable."--Martin Lebowitz, The Kenyon Review.