PhilSoc meeting of Saturday 18^th March at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge

The recording of PhilSoc’s recent meeting is now available to view on the society’s YouTube channel. The lecture was held in the Buckingham House Lecture Theatre, Murray Edwards College, and the speaker was Professor Kasia M. Jaszczolt (University of Cambridge):

There is no doubt that cross-linguistic investigations into temporal reference inform psychologists about the properties of the human concept of time. But it is not common to go further: from linguistic externalisations of the human concept of time to the properties of ‘real’ time as it is discussed in philosophy of physics. In this talk I combine what I call ‘linguistic time’ (time_L), ‘epistemological time’ (time_E) and ‘metaphysical time’ (time_M) to show that an insight into semantic properties of markers of temporality in various, tensed and tenseless, natural languages helps explain the apparent conflict between the dynamic, flowing time_E and static time_M – ‘real’ time that does not flow but instead consists of relations of static precedence and succession (on the so-called ‘B theory’, McTaggart 1908). I present some arguments for the modal foundations of the human concept of time (time as supervenient on epistemic modality, Jaszczolt, e.g. 2009, 2020, in press) and conclude that on the level of universal semantic (modal) building blocks, time_E is essentially static – it only flows on the level of their language- and culture-specific combinations that produce  complex temporal concepts. I conclude by presenting formal representations of temporal reference, using the contextualist theory of Default Semantics. 

Select references:

Jaszczolt, K. M. 2009. Representing Time: An Essay on Temporality as Modality.  Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Jaszczolt, K. M. 2020. Human imprints of real time: From semantics to metaphysics. Philosophia 48: 1855–1879.

Jaszczolt, K. M. In press. ‘Does human time really flow? Metaindexicality, metarepresentation, and basic concepts’. In: K. M. Jaszczolt (ed.), Understanding Human Time. For Oxford Studies of Time in Language and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McTaggart, J. McT. E. 1908. The unreality of time. Mind 17. Reprinted in J. McT. E. McTaggart. 1943. Philosophical Studies. London: Edward Arnold. 110–131.