Time (T)

This will be a reading group on issues in the philosophy of time, with two branches; one of them, every other Friday, will discuss issues having to do with indeterminacy and branching time. Find a preliminary reading list for that branch below. The other will meet the Fridays in between those to discuss time in the philosophy of science. The reading list for this branch will appear below, too, shortly, although it will certainly include excerpts from the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Time, edited by C. Callender.

 

Reading List for the Indeterminacy and Branching Time branch:

 

Thomason, R. H. (1970): ‘Indeterminist time and truth-value gaps’, Theoria 36, 264-281.

McCall, S. (1976): ‘Objective Time Flow’, Philosophy of Science 43, 337-362.

McCall, S. (1979): ‘The Strong Future Tense’, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 20, 489-504

Thomason, R. H. (1984): ‘Combinations of tense and modality’ in D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (eds.), Handbook of philosophical logic, vol. 2, Reidel, Dordrecht (1984), reprinted in 2nd edition (2002), vol. 7, 205-234.

Belnap (1993): ‘Branching space-time’, Synthese, Vol. 92, No. 3 (Sep., 1992), pp. 385-434 [We could maybe read the 2003 postprint available from http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1003//]

McCall, S. (1994): A Model of the Universe, Oxford: Clarendon Press, excerpts

Belnap et al. (2001): Facing the Future, excerpts

Braüner, Hasle, Ohrstrom (2000): ‘Determinism and the Origins of Temporal Logic’, in H. Barringer et al. (eds.): Advances in Temporal Logic, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 185-206.

Müller (2002): ‘Branching space-time, modal logic and the counterfactual conditional’. Preprint available from http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/509/

*Strobach (2007): ‘Fooling around with Tenses’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 38/3, 653-672

Placek and Müller (2007), 'Counterfactuals and Historial Possibilities', Synthese, 154(2), 173-197

Saunders, Wallace (2008): ‘Branching and Uncertainty’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 59(3), 293-305

Placek (2009): ‘Possibilities without possible worlds/histories’. Preprint available from http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4956/

Ohrstrom (2009): ‘In Defence of the Thin Red Line: A Case for Ockhamism’, Humana.mente 8 - Models of Time, 17-32.

 

Reading list for the Time in the Philosophy of Science branch

 

1. Maudlin:Remarks on the Passim of Time
2. Price                                       Flow of time
3. Kutach                                    Asymmetry of influence (causation)
4. John Paul van Bendegem       The Possibility of Discrete Time
5. Jill North                                Time in Thermodynamics
6.1 Lawrence Sklar                       Time in Classical Dynamics
6.2 Steven Savitt                            Time in the Special Theory of Relativity

Others optional/to decide:

John Earman                            Sharpening the Electromagnetic Arrow(s) of Time
D. Atkinson & J. Hilgevoord    Time in Quantum Mechanics
Yuri Balashov                          Persistence
Joshua Mozersky                     Presentism Also, 

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