Featured Essays
Juvenescence - Robert Pogue Harrison
An essay on the experience of heterochronic time in our turbulent age. Harrison offers his characteristically unique take on heterchronic time and humanity’s ability to remain youthful while we age.
Powers of Time - David Lapoujade
One of the best explanations of Bergson’s thought. Lapoujade connects duration with motion and in the process exposes why Bergson’s thought is more than conceptual philosophy. It is the transformation of how we experience ourselves and the world.
The Natural Contract - Michel Serres
Michel Serres at his most political. This 1990 book is a defining work in the modern understanding of the climate crisis. I've written a long essay inspired by the depth and breadth of Serres vision.
The Parasite - Michel Serres
An essay on how to use 'the parasite' as an operational concept that expands our capacity for experience.
Peter Galison - Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps
The twentieth century's need for national and global time was a problem of electromagnetism. It became an abstraction (as relativity) out of these practical and commercial concerns.
Heidegger - Being and Time
With deference to Bergson, Heidegger's Being and Time is the lasting work with respect to philosophical thinking about time.
Time Reborn - Lee Smolin
Lee Smolin argues that physics should no longer treats time as an experiential illusion. It is fundamental to the universe because everything is relational and evolving.
Carlo Rovelli - The Order of Time
A largely speculative work by one of the more famous theorists of Loop Quantum Gravity. Time is not fundamental for Rovelli, it is emergent.
Birth of Physics - Michel Serres
Michel Serres makes Lucretius our contemporary. Published just before Le Parasite, Le Naissance de la physique was a key moment in the history of chaos theory and the ability to see order emerging from disorder -- a reversal of the Enlightenment's formula. Serres finds in Lucretius' De rerum natura a pre-Modern text that offers a more relevant way of thinking about order and disorder free of eternal natural laws.
A Tenth of a Second - Jimena Canales
Modernity didn’t just apply technologies of measuring time at more minute levels. Modernity and time measurement are bound together much more intimately.
The Genesis of the Copernican World - Hans Blumenberg
Copernicus did not kick humanity out of the center of the universe. He made the Earth a star and also tried to restore the harmonious relationship between God’s creation and humanity. The consequences for the configuration of time are underappreciated. This book corrects that.
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