Adrian Bardon

Adrian Bardon holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He teaches courses in the philosophy of space and time, the history of modern philosophy, Kant, critical reasoning (with a focus on ideology and motivated cognition), the philosophy of religion, and political philosophy.

A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time (2013)
Adrian Bardon, A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time, Oxford University Press, 2013

Introduction: What Does It Mean to Ask, “What Is Time?”

 * There are two essential facts about time that most will agree on. First, we think of events as arrayed in a sort of order, where what is happening depends on where we are in that order. Second, we think of events as coming to be and passing away, as undergoing change over, or in, time. (Roughly speaking, we use calendars to track this first aspect of time and clocks for the second.) But these two characteristics seem to be in tension: If events are arrayed in an order, then how can we also say that they come to be and pass away? Is the passage of time real, or is it merely a subjective aspect of our experience? What is it for an event to be ‘in’ time in the first place? Upon reflection, it is very difficult to explain just what a temporal description of the world really amounts to.