Passage Of Time

This book defends a relational theory of the passage of time. The realist view of passage developed in this book differs from the robust, substantivalist position. According to relationism, passage is nothing over and above the succession of events, one thing coming after another. Causally related events are temporally arranged as they happen one after another along observers’ worldlines. There is no unique global passage but a multiplicity of local passages of time. After setting out this positive argument for relationism, the author deals with five common objections to it: (a) triviality of deflationary passage, (b) a-directionality of passage, (c) the impossibility of experiencing passage, (d) fictionalism about passage, and (e) the incompatibility of passage with perduring objects. Relational Passage of Time will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of time, metaphysics, and philosophy of physics.

PAPERBACK: In his 10th book on post-relativity philosophy of time, the Ghanaian philosopher argues that all the theories we read about time are useful only for constructing clocks to accord accurately with the earth's regular motions and astronomical features. The many bemusing technical terms employed (like duration between events, sidereal time, solar time, nutation, equinox, earth's rotation, the precession of the equinoxes etc.), were all invented to account for fixed, general and absolute time, running all through the cosmos and the same everywhere. This view of time, however, was abolished by Einstein. He adds that everything we have ever used to reckon time (including atomic time) amounts to mere physical cycles, pulses or oscillations that we count as the units of time---the years, for instance---but they are passing. He has also uncovered Einstein's undoubted snub to 4-D geometry.

The basic theory presented in a way which emphasizes intuition, problem-solving and the connections with other fields.

"I cannot guarantee that I will be the person you want in your life, but I will do everything in my power to be the person you need." Elara Dunlin never imagined how much her life would change after moving across the country at the start of her senior year of high school. Who is the mysterious man with the deep blue eyes that follows her everywhere she goes? Strange events begin to unfold, causing Elara to question her own reality. The predictable and simple life she has always known dramatically changes on one cold, fateful night...the night when the elusive blue-eyed man finally approaches her directly and shares information that completely turns her world upside down. Eventually Elara realizes that she has to tell her only friend, Cyrus, the truth about the mysterious visitor. Will he believe any of it? The elusive man continues to reveal dark secrets about her troubled past, adding a new dimension to their growing relationship. Is she willing to place all of her trust in this one person who pushes her physically and emotionally farther than she ever thought possible? He had warned Elara that her life would change forever, but does she have the courage to move forward?

In this wide-ranging meditation on the meaning of time, Agacinski weaves together discussions of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, Baudelaire, Barthes, and especially Walter Benjamin--her model for the modern "passer of time"--as she traces a time-line of the philosophy of time.

Maps organize us in space, but they also organize us in time. Looking around the world for the last five hundred years, Time in Maps shows that today’s digital maps are only the latest effort to insert a sense of time into the spatial medium of maps. Historians Kären Wigen and Caroline Winterer have assembled leading scholars to consider how maps from all over the world have depicted time in ingenious and provocative ways. Focusing on maps created in Spanish America, Europe, the United States, and Asia, these essays take us from the Aztecs documenting the founding of Tenochtitlan, to early modern Japanese reconstructing nostalgic landscapes before Western encroachments, to nineteenth-century Americans grappling with the new concept of deep time. The book also features a defense of traditional paper maps by digital mapmaker William Rankin. With more than one hundred color maps and illustrations, Time in Maps will draw the attention of anyone interested in cartographic history.

This book brings together, in a novel way, an account of the structure of time with an account of our language and thought about time. Joshua Mozersky argues that it is possible to reconcile the human experience of time, which is centred on the present, with the objective conception of time, according to which all moments are intrinsically alike. He defends a temporally centreless ontology along with a tenseless semantics that is compatible with - and indeed helps to explain the need for - tensed language and thought. This theory of time also, it is argued, helps to elucidate the nature of change and temporal passage, neither of which need be denied nor relegated to the realm of subjective experience only. The book addresses a variety of topics including whether the past and future are real; whether temporal passage is a genuine phenomenon or merely a subjective illusion; how the asymmetry of time is to be understood; the nature of representation; how something can change its properties yet retain its identity; and whether objects are three-dimensional or four-dimensional. It is a wide-ranging examination of recent issues in metaphysics, philosophy of language and the philosophy of science and presents a compelling picture of the relationship of human beings to the spatiotemporal world.