Real Time

A Reinvention in British Metaphysics 1883-1928
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-0-19-784448-9
Verlag: Oxford University Press Inc

Buch, Englisch, 448 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 168 mm x 242 mm, Gewicht: 724 g

In 1880s Britain, philosophers developed what would become a half-century obsession with time. Back then, time was widely held to be unreal. By the 1920s, it was widely held to be real. This sea change was gradual but sweeping. Early time realists focused on defending the reality of time. From around 1900, they began asking fresh questions about the nature of time, all loosely concerned with its dynamicity—its 'moving on'.

Are the past and future real? Is time fundamentally an 'A-series' or 'B-series': about past, present, and future, or earlier and later? Does time have an intrinsic direction? These questions are still widely debated today. Real Time investigates the reinvention of time realism and follows the emergence of these new, in-house realist debates. Thomas argues these questions are not perennial but rather deeply rooted within this historical context.

The story unfolds through anti-realist figures such as F. H. Bradley and J. M. E. McTaggart, and realists such as Samuel Alexander, Hilda Oakeley, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Karin Costelloe-Stephen, C. D. Broad, Alfred North Whitehead, and Arthur Eddington.

These figures returned to time repeatedly across their careers, grappling with it in a variety of ways. Many placed time at the heart of their philosophies. Through their published works and unpublished archival correspondence, Thomas shows how time became one of the problems of early twentieth-century philosophy—and those vintage ideas still shape ours today.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Thomas, Emily

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Introduction

- 1: Three Victorian Ideas around Time: Evolution, Linearity, and Progress

- 2: The Rise of Unreal Time and British Idealism 1883-1893

- 3: Time Realism: Boosted by the Specious Present and Evolution 1886-1895

- 4: The British Presentism-Eternalism Debate, Founded 1897

- 5: The Genesis of McTaggart's "The Unreality of Time" 1893-1908

- 6: G. E. Moore's Common Sense Realism: Presentism, A-Theory, and the Ghost of Henry Sidgwick (1897-1911)

- 7: A French Interlude: Britain's "Bergson Boom" 1909-1911

- 8: Bertrand Russell on the B-Series and Mental-Physical Time 1901-1915

- 9: Hilda Oakeley's Time Realism: Origins and Bergsonism 1911-1916

- 10: Karin Costelloe-Stephen's Bergsonism and 'The Facts' of Time 1911-1922

- 11: Sexism and Time: A Feminist Reading of Oakeley and Costelloe-Stephen's Bergsonian Time

- 12: Samuel Alexander's "Generative" Time and Its Eternalist Universe 1911-1920

- 13: Time, Events, and Passage in A. N. Whitehead's London Years 1911-1920

- 14: C. D. Broad on Eternalism and Growing Block Theory 1913-1928

- 15: Arthur Eddington and Time's Arrow into the Progressive Future 1919-1928

- Afterword

Über Autor(innen)

Emily Thomas is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. She has published widely on the history of metaphysics (especially space and time) and on historical women philosophers. Thomas' research has been supported by the NWO, the AHRC, and the British Academy. In 2020, she won a Leverhulme Prize for research excellence.