Time Reading Group

Program • Abstracts (password-protected)

The Metaphysics of Time and its Occupants project members has hosted a fortnightly reading group on the philosophy of time in  Neuchâtel and then Geneva for the first three years of the project’s run. Its purpose was to read and discuss classical and contemporary articles from both the metaphysics and the philosophy of physics traditions.

Past meetings

· Spring 2018 ·
22.05.18
  • Glick, D., “Against Quantum Indeterminacy”
08.05.18
  • Zimmerman, D., “The A-theory of Time, the B-theory of Time and ‘Taking Tense Seriously'”
24.04.18
  • Dasgupta, S., “Constitutive Explanation”
10.04.18
  • O’Conaill, D., “Temporal Modes of Experience and the Experience of Passage”
20.03.18
  • Yates, D., “Inverse functionalism and the individuation of powers”
06.03.18
  • Pickup, M., “Unextended Complexes”
· Winter 2018 ·
20.02.18
  • Pezet, R., “A foundation for presentism”
06.02.18
  • Sattig, T., “Ordinary Objects in the Relativistic World”
23.01.18
  • McDaniel, K., “Parthood Is Identity”
09.01.18
  • Bacon, A., “Is reality fundamentally qualitative?”
· Fall 2017 ·
19.12.17
  • Cotnoir, A., “Parts as Counterparts”
05.12.17
  • Barker, S. & Smart B., “The ultimate argument against dispositional monist accounts of laws”
22.11.17 (Wednesday)
  • McKenzie, K. & Muller, F. A., “Bound States and the Special Composition Question”
24.10.17
  • Wüthrich, C. & Callender, C., “What Becomes of a Causal Set”
10.10.17
  • Simons, P., “Where It’s At: Modes of Occupation and Kinds of Occupant”
· Spring 2017 (Neuchâtel) ·
30.05.17
  • Ismael J., “The Open Future” (Ch. 6 of How Physics Makes Us Free)
23.05.17
  • Effingham, N., “Universalism, Vagueness and Supersubstantivalism”
16.05.17

  • Lehmkuhl, D., “The Metaphysics of Supersubstantivalism”

09.05.17
  • Gilmore, C., “Building Enduring Objects out of Spacetime”
02.05.17
  • Schaffer, J., “Spacetime the One Substance”
25.04.17
  • Cameron, R., “The Open Future” (Ch. 5 of The Moving Spotlight)
11.04.17
  • Eagle, A., “Persistence, Vagueness, and Location”
04.04.17
  • Pashby, T., “How Do Things Persist? Location Relations in Physics and the Metaphysics of Persistence”
28.03.17
  • Torre, S., “Restricted Diachronic Composition and Special Relativity”
21.03.17
  • Gibson, I. & Pooley O., “Relativistic Persistence”
14.03.17
  • Gilmore, C., “Where in the Relativistic World Are We?”
07.03.17
  • Bacon, A., “Tense and Relativity”
· Fall 2016 (Neuchâtel) ·
13.12.16
  • Skow, B., “Relativity and the Passage of Time” (Ch. 9 of Objective Becoming)
06.12.16
  • Cameron, R., “The Moving Spotlight” (Ch. 4 of The Moving Spotlight)
29.11.16
  • Cameron, R., “On Giving and Ontological Account of Tense” (Ch. 3 of The Moving Spotlight)
22.11.16
  • Prosser, S., “Why Does Time Seem to Pass?”
15.11.16 – In the presence of the author
  • O’Conaill, D., “Ontic Structural Realism and The Ontology of Relations”
08.11.16
  • Esfeld M. & Lam V., “Ontic structural realism as a metaphysics of objects”
01.11.16
  • Wolff, J., “Do Objects Depend on Structures?”
25.10.16
  • French, S., “The interdependence of structure, objects and dependence”
18.10.16
  • McKenzie, K., “Priority and Particle Physics: Ontic Structural Realism as a Fundamentality Thesis”
11.10.16

  • Allori, V., Goldstein, S., Tumulka, R. & Zanghi, N., “On the Common Structure of Bohmian Mechanics and the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber Theory”

04.10.16
  • Ney, A., “Finding the World in the Wave Function: Some Strategies for Solving the Macro-Object Problem”
· Spring 2016 (Neuchâtel) ·
31.05.16
  • Maudlin, T., “Completeness, Supervenience, and Ontology”
24.05.16
  • North, J., “The Structure of a Quantum World”
10.05.16
  • Ismael J. & Schaffer, J., “Quantum Holism: Non-Separability as Common Ground” (draft)
03.05.16
  • Wallace, D., “Everett and Structure”
26.04.16
  • Monton, B., “Quantum Mechanics and 3N-dimensional Space”
19.04.16
  • Ney, A., “The Status of our Ordinary Three Dimensions in a Quantum Universe”
12.04.16
  • Saunders, S., “Time, Quantum Mechanics and Tense”
22.03.16 – Special session: Introduction to GTR by Juliusz Doboszewski
  • Manchak, J., “On Gödel and the Ideality of Time”
15.03.16
  • Savitt, S., “The Replacement of Time”
08.03.16
  • Belot, G., “Dust, Time and Symmetries”
23.02.16
  • Gödel, K., “A Remark about the Relationship between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy”
  • Earman, J., “Appendix to Chapter 6 (Time Travel): Gödel on the Ideality of Time” in Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieks
· Fall 2015 (Neuchâtel) ·
15.12.15
  • Maudlin, T., “Thoroughly Muddled McTaggart or How to Abuse Gauge Freedom to Generate Metaphysical Monstruosities”
08.12.15
  • Earman, J., “Thoroughly Modern McTaggart or What McTaggart Would Have Said if He Had Read the General Theory of Relativity”
1.12.15
  • Dieks, D., “Becoming, Relativity, and Locality”
10.11.15
  • Pooley, O., “Relativity, the Open Future, and the Passage of Time”
03.11.15
  • Zimmerman, D., “Presentism and the Spacetime Manifold“
27.10.15
  • Belnap, N. & Placek, T., “Indeterminism is a Modal Notion: Branching Spacetimes and Earman’s Pruning”
20.10.15
  • Skow, B., “Relativity and the Moving Spotlight”
13.10.15
  • Maudlin, T., “On the Passing of Time”, in The Metaphysics within Physics
06.10.15
  • Earman, J., “Reassessing the Prospects for a Growing Block Model of the Universe”
30.09.15
  • Wüthrich, C., “The Fate of Presentism in Modern Physics”
22.09.15
  • Putnam, H., “Time and Physical Geometry”
  • Stein, H., “On Relativity Theory and the Openness of the Future”
15.09.15
  • Fine, K., “The Reality of Tense”
  • Hofweber, T. & Lange, M. (draft), “Fine’s Fragmentalist Interpretation of Special Relativity”
01.09.15
  • McTaggart, J. E., “The Unreality of Time”
  • Dummett, M., “A Defense of McTaggart’s Argument for the Unreality of Time”
  • Mellor, D. H., Real Time II, “McTaggart’s Argument”