Time from Hegel from an Analytic Perspective

Dimitri Pelletier (Concordia University), Hank Long (Concordia University), Jesse Smoot (Concordia University), Zacharie Michaud, Ulf Hlobil (Concordia University)

What is experience? What is reality? How are they connected to the concept of time? Are experience

and reality measurable? Is the qualitative time of experience measurable?

Both philosophy and more recently physics have spoken abundantly about time. At the beginning of the

century in 1922, two giants, Einstein and Bergson crossed swords on the notion of time. Einstein laid

down the gauntlet when he quipped: il n’y a pas de temps des philosophes.

In this speaker series, we would like to confront these two age-old disciplines, philosophy and physics,

to see if a coherent discourse can be developed about time in the 21st century in which the two

disciplines do not completely speak past each other.

However, we do not want to look at the notion of time, cold turkey without couching it in a more

specific debate. We would risk falling into an unfathomable rabbit-hole. There are two debates we

would like to focus on: the large debate on the nature of time that is interdisciplinary and that seems to

oppose the conception of time of philosophers to that of physicists.

The second, narrower debate is the one that relates time to the a priori and that opposes semanticists to

phenomenologists. We hope to show that these two debates are not entirely unrelated.

How is time related to space and the a priori? Should time and space be treated in the same way

from a philosophical and perhaps physical point of view? Ulf Hlobil will tackle this problem while

presenting on the analytical take on time expressed in McTaggart’s famous paper The Unreality of

Time.