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The drift of naturalist and empiricist philosophy, as well as twentiethcentury physics generally, has been in the direction of confuting many common-sense intuitions and allegedly a priori rationalist philosophical convictions. While this is a tendency i generally share, in the case of fundamental views about time i find myself to a significant degree of contrary mind. Let me start at the end by stating, as broadly and directly as i can, the conclusions i reach and defend about time. First, time is odd, and a puzzle: and not just in the way that St. Augustine meant in his often repeated remarks.1 time is odd because a bedrock of intuitions about it is to be found at the lowest level of analysis and reflection about the world. temporality cannot be thought away. Space can be, but time cannot. there is no level of consciousness or analysis from which temporality is absent. And in a sense, this is surprising. time ought to be thinkable away, if we were ingenious or imaginative enough. Some have, of course, thought that it is. But they are wrong. time was lurking there anyway, even if they declined to say aloud that it was. Moreover, not mere temporality as such is there, admitting a plethora of structural contours or metrics. Rather, specifics of what time can be conceived to be will be found at the fundamental level of inquiry. i argue that the prevailing positions in the philosophy of time, which are for the most part empiricist, and hold that time can have a wide range of “topologies” (structural shapes and their study) and “metrics” (roughly, measures of structural sizes), are wrong. in fact, i take on, with C H A P t e R X Time time 159 these convictions, more opponents than the standard contemporary naturalist and empiricist ones, and what many argue are the metaphysical implications of modern physics. the preceding array of stances joins ranks with many varieties of rationalism in the history of philosophy (and theology), including Aristotelian ones, with respect to time, in holding that there are possible atemporal circumstances. More precisely, for these rationalist and Aristotelian positions there are circumstances in which there is no motion. Kant held that the structure of the world as we apprehend it (both internally and externally) is necessarily temporal. Kant, to me, is right about something central. However, he is not right to take inexpungible temporality to be merely phenomenal or subjective. We cannot think time away, nor can we seriously conceive that it fails to belong in the objective order of things-in-themselves independent of us. there is some leeway in the contours time might have. the implications of special relativity for simultaneity, and the fact that both relativistic and newtonian temporal worlds are possible, show this. Kant is mistaken to suppose a fixed, fully replete “euclidean” content for time. this is a third central claim. the goalposts can be moved a little and in ways that don’t gibe with common-sense temporal intuition. in the nature of the claims being made, how could they possibly be defended? they seem purely (and merely) intuitive. However, my intention is that they should be defensible and defended. this can be done in two ways. First, by reductio: by attempting to conceive a universe atemporally or radically temporal—a universe with a temporal topology and metric quite different from the actual ones—and running up against the impossibility of the task, feeling in the process the temporal structure of the world we are forced to affirm. the second kind of defence is to show that nothing in the physics of time precludes at least some synthetic a priori structures for temporality; more powerfully, that the physics cannot be articulated without the assumption of those structures. this second defence i will be able to provide only partly, but some efforts in this direction will be undertaken. But the attempt here will be skeletal, and must be more than usually tentative. i will welcome assistance and correction, and the challenge of specialists who think i err. deep convictions are held about temporality. no assumptions are made here, nor have i intransigent convictions about the categorical and ontic geography of temporal things. does time exist? What is it if it does? the eighteenth century? now? to some degree the most reasonable account of these matters seems to me heuristic. it is temporality as such—the universe exhibiting temporality—which seems “not thinkable away” and certainly...

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