The Temporality of Contemporaneity and Contemporary Art: Kant, Kentridge and Cave Art as Elective Contemporaries

This article contributes to understanding of Contemporary Art and of the temporality of contemporaneity, along with the philosophy of time more generally. I propose a diachronic contemporaneity over time gaps – elective contemporaneity – through examination of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, the Third Analogy and the concept of ‘following’ among artistic geniuses; diachronic recognition and disjunctive synchronicity discoverable in William Kentridge’s multimedia artworks; as well as non-chronological temporal implications of superimpositions in late Palaeolithic cave art suggesting ‘graphic respect’. Elective contemporaneity shows up complexity in relations to past and present, putting in question definitions of ‘Contemporary Art’ restricted to either chronology or supposedly definitive paradigms.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Causal loops are a recurring feature in the philosophy of time travel, where it is generally agreed that they are logically possible but may come with a theoretical cost. This paper introduces an unfamiliar set of causal loop cases involving knowledge or beliefs about the future: self-fulfilling prophecy loops (SFP loops). I show how and when such loops arise and consider their relationship to more familiar causal loops.

Sound Art and Time

This chapter explores the relationship between sound art and time, focusing on a set of works that mark milestones in the history of sound art and that explicitly engage varieties of temporality. It begins with a discussion of Thomas Edison’s invention of phonography, which allowed sound to be captured and gave it an untimely existence. It then turns to the work of John Cage, analysing it by way of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time. The essay goes on to discuss the notions of time, duration, and eternity in Maryanne Amacher’s radio works, Max Neuhaus’s installations, La Monte Young’s Dream House, Jem Finer’s Longplayer, and other works.

Time, Transcendence in Islamic Thought and an Embrace of “Catholic Modernity”

Taylor characterizes Western modernity as being very inhospitable to the transcendent, yet also as opening an opportunity for a renewed engagement with the transcendent from within modernity. This debate is also vivid in Islam and I will reconstruct it by focusing on the concept of time (dahr). Some strains in Islam condemned the posture of maximizing the “flourishing of life” within the limits of (a life)time as dahriya because it would, in their eyes, constitute a rejection altogether of the transcendent. This position was seen as the quintessence of “the philosophers” (al Ghazali) and of Western modernity (al Afghani). Opposing this view, I will then explain how and why I can make a rapprochement between Charles Taylor’s proposal of a “Catholic modernity” and Islamic modernity through the lenses of Muhammad Iqbal’s philosophy of time. Through his analysis of the hadith “Do not vilify time, because time is God,” Iqbal shows that time (dahr) should not be considered as the antithesis of transcendence, but that in time, from within dahr, transcendence is present: in “creative evolution” (Bergson), life is not enclosed in immanence, but on the contrary God is manifesting himself under his name dahr.

Newton's Metaphysics

This collection of papers by a leading philosophical Newton scholar offers new interpretations of Newton’s account of space, gravity, motion, inertia, and laws—all evergreens in the literature. The volume also breaks new ground in focusing on Newton’s philosophy of time, Newton’s views on emanation, and Newton’s modal metaphysics. In addition, the volume is unique in exploring the very rich resonances between Newton’s and Spinoza’s metaphysics, including the ways in which Newton and his circles responded to the threat by, and possible accusation of, Spinozism. Seven chapters have been published before and will be republished with minor corrections. Two of these chapters are coauthored: one with Zvi Biener and one with Mary Domski. Two chapters are wholly new and are written especially for this volume. In addition, the volume includes two postscripts with new material responding to critics. A main part of the argument of these essays is not just to characterize the conceptual choices Newton made in developing the structure of theory that would facilitate the kind of measurements characteristic of the Newtonian style, but also to show that these choices, in turn, were informed by intellectual aspirations that brought Newton’s edifice into theological and philosophical conflicts. As these conflicts became acute, these drove further conceptual refinement. Many of the essays in the volume relate the development of Newton’s philosophy to the philosophies of his contemporaries, especially Spinoza and Samuel Clarke.

Postscript to Chapter 7

Since chapter 7 first appeared, Katherine Brading has illuminated Newton’s philosophy of time in two important papers (Brading, 2017 and 2019). Readers may naturally wonder how I would respond to her criticism (Brading, 2017). Part of our disagreement is terminological and part is philosophical. Some of our differences are merely apparent, but a few are, perhaps, not. My interest here is to convey the significance of her approach and use it to develop my position; along the way I mark some of our possible disagreements over Newton’s metaphysics with the aim to make more precise how I understand Newton’s philosophy of time....

The future ain’t what it used to be

This paper explores mutable futurism, the view according to which the future can literally change—that is, it can happen that a future time t changes from containing an event E to lacking it (or vice versa). Mutable futurism has received little attention so far, and the details and implications of the view are underexplored in the literature. For instance, it currently lacks a precise metaphysical model and a formal semantics. Although we do not endorse mutable futurism, our goal here is to strengthen the case for mutable futurism and help establish it as a worthy contender in the debate on the philosophy of time. To attain this goal, (i) we try to make mutable futurism, along with its metaphysical and inferential commitments, as clear as possible, by providing it with a coherent metaphysical model and a plausible semantics, and (ii) we show that it can be backed by theoretical reasons.