B8: The Time of Science and the Time of Our Lives

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B8 investigates metaphysical and methodological lessons from how modern physics treats time. Issues in the metaphysics of time are particularly interesting from the perspective of inductive metaphysics for two reasons. First, there is a discrepancy between our everyday conception of time (the time of our lives) and how science represents time (the time of science). Second, even within science, and in physics in particular, there are discrepancies between what different theories say about time. These tensions raise difficult questions about how to weigh different kinds of (empirical) data against each other and draw metaphysical conclusions. We will explore these issues with respect to two research questions: (i) What metaphysical theory best explains the apparent directionality of time? (ii) How to understand what has been called ‘the disappearance of time’ in quantum gravity?