| # | Series | Episode |
| 1. |  | About time, part 1: Newton's exploding clock 28 minutes Most of us think of time as something that divides neatly into seconds, minutes and hours, in a way that’s as regular and predictable at the farthest reaches of the cosmos as it is in our kitchens. But scientists and philosophers have discovered that time has some weird tricks up its sleeve. This week we’re talking about twins who grow older at different rates, broken vases that jump off the floor to reassemble themselves on the bench, and why quantum physicists are learning to do without time altogether. |
| 2. |  | What Is Time? | Emily Thomas 59 minutes In this episode of “What Is X?” Justin E.H. Smith and Emily Thomas tackle the timely yet timeless question: "What is time?" Is time an external, objective fact, or is the flow and tempo of the world internal to us—in some sense, all in our head? Could a robot have consciousness even if it didn't understand time? To help concretize these potent questions, Justin and Emily look back at the thought of a now mostly-obscure metaphysician by the name of J.M.E. McTaggart, who argued that time was un... |
| 3. |  | 158 | David Wallace on the Arrow of Time 108 minutes I talk with philosopher/physicist David Wallace about entropy, the arrow of time, and quantum mechanics. |
| 4. |  | Hugh Mellor on Time 12 minutes Events happen in time. And time is essentially tensed: there is past, present, future. D.H. Mellor, author of Real Time (and Real Time 2) suggests otherwise. In this podcast for Philosophy Bites he explains why time isn't tensed. |
| 5. |  | Time Does Not Exist: Carlo Rovelli 54 minutes In Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli's world, time does not exist. Nor, he argues, does it in our own world. We human beings, he suggests, may be the universe's only real time machine. Rovelli has spent years writing and lecturing about time, and a whole host of complex scientific conundrums — all in an effort to share the beauty he sees in uncertainty. *This episode originally aired on April 22, 2021. |
| 6. | | 149 | Lee Smolin on Time, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality 89 minutes I talk with physicist Lee Smolin about time, the universe, and the future of physics. |
| 7. |  | Back from the end of time | Erik Verlinde, Huw Price, Alison Fernandez 35 minutes Looking for a link we mentioned? It's here: https://linktr.ee/philosophyf... it funny that a day at the office seems to drag by so slowly, and yet a day in the park is over in a flash? Is time, and the way it passes something that actually exists in the physical world? Or is it something that only humans perceive? In this debate Back from the End of Time, we’ve brought you a world leading Physicist Erik Verlinde, a world leading philosophers Huw Price, and Alison Fernandez to debate the nature of time.... |
| 8. | | The Illusion of Now | Julian Barbour, Tim Maudlin, Emily Thomas 42 minutes Looking for a link we mentioned? It's here: https://linktr.ee/philosophyf... and future are worlds we can never inhabit. We live of necessity in the present. But physicists and philosophers with very different outlooks, from Einstein to Derrida, claim that the present is an illusion. Are we deluded by experience into imagining the present is real? In this episode of Philosophy for our Times, Philosopher of science Tim Maudlin joins author of The End of Time Julian Barbour and philosopher and historian ... |
| 9. |  | 343: The Reality of Time 10 minutes More at philosophytalk.org/shows/reality-time. ... Augustine suggested that when we try to grasp the idea of time, it seems to evade us: "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know." So is time real or merely an artificial construct? Is time a fundamental or emergent property of our universe or a part of our cognitive apparatus? Do we live in a continuum with a definite past and present, or do we live in a succession of ‘Nows’, and if the... |
| 10. |  | Time, Space and Nature of Reality through the Lens of Quantum Theory with Dr Carlo Rovelli 61 minutes What is time? Is time real or just an illusion? Time is an enigma, a mystery that never ceases to perplex us. Philosophers, poets, painters and thinkers have long debated its significance, while scientists have discovered that its structure differs from our intuitive understanding of it. Our view of time has changed dramatically throughout the years, from Boltzmann to quantum theory, and from Einstein to loop quantum gravity. In the huge cosmos, time moves at various speeds in different places, the past an... |
| 11. | | Huw Price on Backward Causation 16 minutes Effects can't precede their causes, can they? The direction of causation is forwards not backwards. But this common belief doesn't mesh with every aspect of contemporary physics. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast Huw Price discusses the counterintuitive idea that retro-causation might occur. Philosophy Bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy. |
| 12. |  | What is the future? 54 minutes This second series is all about the future - and in this first episode we're going to be considering what the future even is... Have you ever wondered how time works? It turns out, the answer is a lot more complicated than we thought. Join our wondering and wonderful conversation with philosopher of science Matt Farr, professor of psychology Nicky Clayton, and professor of linguistics and philosophy, Kasia Jaszczolt. We'll be talking about everything from physics to linguistics... and from broken eggs to Ei... |
| 13. |  | M. Joshua Mozersky, “Time, Language, and Ontology: The World from the B-Theoretic Perspective” (Oxford UP, 2015) 73 minutes Is the present time uniquely real, or do past or future equally exist? Does saying the word “now” simply express the speaker’s current position in time the way “here” expresses her current position in space? In Time, Language, and Ontology: The World from the B-Theoretic Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2015), M. Joshua Mozersky, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, argues for ontological commitment to past, present, and future alike, and provides an account of tensed language in wh... |
| 14. |  | On Time 76 minutes Ammar Azzouz, Elizabeth F. Cohen, and Matthew Soteriou discuss the politics and philosophy of time |
| 15. |  | Episode 9: A Journey to the Edge of Hypertime 67 minutes This is the first of several episodes of the SpaceTimeMind podcast wherein amateur chrononauts Richard Brown and Pete Mandik tackle topics in the physics and metaphysics of time. In this episode, one of the main ideas we kick around is whether any moments exist beyond the present moment. Additionally, we tackle the issue of whether it makes any more sense to say that time flows than it does to say that space moves. If time flows at some rate, must there exist a hypertime relative to which first-order time c... |
| 16. | | Episode 12: The Fourth Dimension 60 minutes In this episode of the SpaceTimeMind podcast, Richard Brown and Pete Mandik continue their discussion from Episode 9 ("A Journey to the Edge of Hypertime”) and consider the view that time constitutes a fourth dimension analogous to the three spatial dimensions of height, width, and depth. What’s gained and what’s lost in viewing moments other than the present as analogous to places other than here? Do we lose an ability to account for change and motion? And if a computer simulation of a brain can have consc... |
| 17. | | Episode 14: Eternalism Versus Presentism (with Brit Brogaard) 87 minutes A 3-D object, fully present in the now, walks into a bar where the bartender is a 4-D spacetime worm. The worm asks the object “Why so tense?” Further instantiations of such high-grade philoso-physical hilarity ensue in this, the third episode of the SpaceTimeMind podcast on the topic of time. Brit Brogaard is back by popular demand, and this time a Brogaard/Brown presentist team-up gives Pete “Erstwhile Eternalist” Mandik a run for his money…forever. |
| 18. |  | Professor Huw Price Inaugural Lecture 56 minutes Huw Price gives his inaugural lecture as Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy: Bertrand Russell’s celebrated essay “On the Notion of Cause” was first delivered to the Aristotelian Society on 4 November 1912, as Russell’s Presidential Address. The piece is best known for a passage in which its author deftly positions himself between the traditional metaphysics of causation and the British crown, firing broadsides in both directions: “The law of causality”, Russell declares, “Like much that passes muster ... |
| # | Series | Episode |
| 19. | | About time, part 3: Time and perception 28 minutes For something that we commonly consider to be as regular and predictable as clockwork, time sure can feel weird. Sometimes it drags, sometimes it rushes, sometimes it seems to stop altogether. We don't experience this skewed perception with other phenomena - with colours, for instance. The blue of the sky looks like the blue of the sky, no matter what we're doing or how we're feeling. So why is our experience of time so variable? Is it something that happens purely in the mind, or does it have something to ... |
| 20. | | 140 | Dean Buonomano on Time, Reality, and the Brain 88 minutes I talk with neuroscientist Dean Buonomano about how the brain reconstructs time and other aspects of reality. |
| 21. |  | Bergson and Time 51 minutes Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and his ideas about human experience of time passing and how that differs from a scientific measurement of time, set out in his thesis on 'Time and Free Will' in 1889. He became famous in France and abroad for decades, rivalled only by Einstein and, in the years after the Dreyfus Affair, was the first ever Jewish member of the Académie Française. It's thought his work influenced Proust and Woolf, and the Cubists. He died in 1... |
| 22. | | Carlos Montemayor, “Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time” (Brill, 2012) 70 minutes The philosophy of time has a variety of subtopics that are of great general as well as philosophical interest, such as the nature of time, the possibility of time travel, and the nature of tensed language. In Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time (Brill, 2012), Carlos Montemayor, assistant professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University, focuses on the question: how do we represent time? That is, how is temporal information represented in biological creat... |
| 23. | | Chronomobilities 28 minutes Going from one country to another is mostly thought of as a movement in space - a change of one physical location for another. But migration can also make profound changes in the everyday experience of time, and this is especially acute in cases where migration status is uncertain - on a temporary visa, say, or in immigration detention. |
| 24. | | 89 | Lera Boroditsky on Language, Thought, Space, and Time 89 minutes I talk with cognitive scientist and psychologist Lera Boroditsky about how language shapes our thought, including how we conceive of space and time. |
| 25. |  | HAP 17 - Event Horizon - African Philosophy of Time 20 minutes John Mbiti’s influential and controversial claim that traditional Africans experience time as having “a long past, a present, and virtually no future.” |
| # | Series | Episode |
| 26. | | About time, part 2: Time in fiction 28 minutes During the early 20th century, physicists and philosophers were discovering strange things about time. And these ideas were being picked up by novelists, who wove them into such masterpieces as Joyces Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway – texts that continue to challenge our notions of everyday temporality. |
| 27. | | 124 | Solo: How Time Travel Could and Should Work 162 minutes A solo episode on the physics and fiction of time travel. |
| 28. | | From the Vaults: Time Travel Adam Roberts, Bryan Roberts, and Emily Thomas discuss time travel, and how thinking and writing about it has changed science and philosophy. |
| 29. |  | Episode 77, ‘Time Travel: The Grandfather Paradox and Abilities’ with Olivia Coombes (Part I - Time Traveller Abilities) 50 minutes Welcome to 'Episode 77 (Part I of II)', where we’ll be discussing the grandfather paradox with Olivia Coombes. |
| 30. | | Episode 77, ‘Time Travel: The Grandfather Paradox and Abilities’ with Olivia Coombes (Part II - Further Analysis and Discussion) 48 minutes Welcome to 'Episode 77 (Part II of II)', where we’ll be discussing time travel with Olivia Coombes. |
| 31. |  | Ep. 41 - Is Time Travel Possible? w/Dr. Taylor Cyr 112 minutes In this episode, Dr. Taylor Cyr schools us on various theories of time in order to help us think about the possibility of time travel. This dude is the man, you are going to learn something! | If you like this podcast, then support it on Patreon for $1, $3, or $5 a month. Any amount helps, and for $5 you get a Parker's Pensées sticker and instant access to all the episode as I record them instead of waiting for their release date. Check it out here: | Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/parkers_pensees |... |
| 32. |  | 0G80: Primer and the Ethics of Time Travel 49 minutes Here's what's going to happen, I'm going to do a matrix like voiceover and you're going to listen, and when that's over, you're going to have even less of a clue what's going on. It all started with a box... We're doing primer! Y'all asked, and we... |
| 33. |  | Time Travel and The Grandfather Paradox with Helen Robertson 63 minutes Imagine you build a time machine. Is it possible for you to travel back in time, meet your grandfather before he produces any children, and kill him? Time travel is a sci-fi staple. Is Back to the Future philosophically accurate? Did J.K Rowling crack the secret of time travel in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban? As a bonus we explain why Rick and Morty's The Vat of Acid Episode isn't about time travel. |
| 34. |  | Philosophy In Film - 028 - Avengers Endgame 116 minutes Avengers Endgame: the Philosophy of Time Travel |
| 35. |  | Episode #1. Time travel ft. Steph Rennick 18 minutes Hello, and welcome to the first ever episode of Glasgow University's Philosophy Podcast, Thoughts! Today we’ll be discussing Time travel: an oft discussed, but rarely properly examined, topic. Joining us is Dr. Stephanie Rennick, Glasgow University researcher, and hosting today is Hamish Stewart. | To view the full episode description, visit thoughtsuofg.com |
| 36. | | Tenet Explained 51 minutes Christopher Nolan's Tenet is a visual feast, but does it make any sense? Eron Fasser explains if you can you time travel to change the past and if Neil and Protagonist have free will? Brain in a Vat Book: www.smarturl.it/lockdownbook |
| 37. |  | What Is It Like to Be a Groundhog? 47 minutes In this episode we discuss the philosophical implications of being stuck in a time loop, as in Groundhog Day. We talk to some budding philosophers about whether they would opt to enter a Groundhog Day scenario for the possibility of becoming more virtuous. We also wish a Happy Death Day to a Russian Doll. Music in this episode: "Attack of the Mole Men" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licen... Kevin MacLeod (inco... |
| 38. |  | 28. Groundhog Day (w/ Kieran Setiya) 110 minutes We are joined by Kieran Setiya (Philosophy, MIT) to discuss what makes life worth living, what's lost in an infinite time loop, and to what extent flourishing within such a loop is possible. Along the way, we explore grief, the midlife crisis, atelic actions, the Buddhist concept of Saṃsāra, Kierkegaard, female agency in a world dominated by the male perspective, and the metaphysics of time loops and time travel. Supervenience violations and imaginative resistance are considered, as is Bill Murray's career ... |
| 39. | | 0G25: Minority Report and Time Paradoxes 48 minutes As sometimes happens, we've generated a minority report to last episode's majority report. The differences between the short story and the movie are substantial, including a reversal in the outcome. While we have much debate over whether this minority... |
| # | Series | Episode |
| 40. |  | HoP 040 - Let's Get Physical - Aristotle's Natural Philosophy 22 minutes Aristotle's Physics explains change, time and place with the help of his actuality/potentiality distinction |
| 41. | | HoP 041 - Richard Sorabji on Time and Eternity in Aristotle 26 minutes Richard Sorabji discusses time, eternity and mosquitos in Aristotle's Physics |
| 42. | | HoP 098 - For a Limited Time Only - John Philoponus 23 minutes John Philoponus refutes Aristotle’s and Proclus’ arguments for the eternity of the universe, and develops new ideas in physics. |
| 43. | | HoP 110 - Life and Time - Augustine's Confessions 22 minutes In the Confessions Augustine weaves autobiography with reflections on the nature of God, man, and time. |
| 44. | | HoP 165 - Neither the Time Nor the Place - Hasdai Crescas 24 minutes Ḥasdai Crescas shows Aristotelian physics who’s boss, by defending alternative conceptions of time, place and infinity. |
| 45. | | HoP 226 - Full of Potential - Thirteenth Century Physics 22 minutes Richard Rufus and anonymous commentators on Aristotle explore the nature of motion, time, infinity and space. |
| 46. | | HPI 38 - A Day in the Life - Theories of Time 22 minutes Ancient Indian cosmology and the Vaiśeṣika defense of the reality of time and space. |
| 47. |  | 794. The symmetry argument 3 minutes We seem to be awfully bothered by the fact that we will one day no longer exist. And yet, we didn't suffer from the equally true fact that for a long time we didn't exist. | | --- | | Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/stoicmeditations/support... |
| 48. | | Alexus McLeod, “Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time” (Lexington Books, 2018) 67 minutes The ancient Maya are popularly known for their calendar, but their concept of time and the metaphysics surrounding that conception are not. In Philosophy of the Ancient Maya: Lords of Time (Lexington Books, 2018), Alexus McLeod reconstructs an ancient Mayan metaphysical system based on key texts and other artifacts plus using analogies with ancient Chinese philosophical thought. On his view, the Maya held that we can understand everything in temporal terms but that everything does not reduce to time, and th... |
| # | Series | Episode |
| 49. | | 199 | Elizabeth Cohen on Time and Other Political Values 73 minutes I talk with political scientist Elizabeth Cohen on the role of time in government and politics. |
| 50. | | About time, part 4: The insect clock 28 minutes When a person dies under suspicious circumstances, it can be hard to determine exactly what happened and when. Enter the forensic entomologist, whose job it is to study the action of insects on the body and present their evidence to the court. Insects provide a “clock” that can help to piece together the puzzle of death – but in doing this, insects also raise a number of fascinating questions that touch on the philosophy of science, law and time. |
| 51. |  | How Capitalism Commodifies Time 45 minutes On episode 2 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss how millennials love talking about hating capitalism, the influence capitalism has had on our understanding of time, and the blurring line between who you are as a worker and who you are as an individual. Then they discuss how Covid-19 has challenged our conception of time and what this means for the future!Interested in the works discussed? You can find them here: Edward Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”Karl Marx, CapitalJudy W... |
| 52. |  | Episode 97: Meghan Sullivan discusses time biases 56 minutes Should we care more about the future than the past? |