Christophe Bouton and Philippe Huneman: Time of Nature and the Nature of Time: Philosophical Perspectives of Time in Natural Sciences

摘要

This is an interdisciplinary edited collection that aims to expand the study of philosophy of time from the usual metaphysical motley crew of issues. The focus is, as they say, "much more on the dialogue between philosophy of science and the sciences, and much less on the metaphysics" (p. 4). The overarching aim is to assess the concept of time across several disciplines (within the natural sciences: hence "time of nature") to see if the concept is stable across disciplines (and scales within disciplines), or if each field (and scale) involves a different notion of time. One would expect that since it is natural sciences being dealt with, it is just whatever the time of our best physical theory says. But there is the rub: there is not really agreement even in physics. Hence, the editors' stated aim to "define a common language to conceive of the distinct ways different scientific disciplines view time" (p. 9)-but this is rather optimistic and, not surprisingly, not achieved by any means, though a collection such as this moves the task forward somewhat. But they do expose how the concept of time is unstable across disciplines, with very different methods, tools, and properties apparent depending on the context.