What Makes Time Special?

The headline of this post, "What Makes Time Special?" Is the title of a recent book by philosopher Craig Callender, one of the co-winners this year of the Lakatos Award, for the best work in the philosophy of science.

With due respect to the other co-winner, Sabina Leonelli, my arbitrary spotlight of curiosity today falls on Professor Callender, perhaps in part just because his name looks a lot like "calendar," which is a great name to have if you're going to be writing about Time as a philosophical subject!

Callender begins the book in a striking way, "Time is a big invisible thing that will kill you," he writes. That sounds like a slightly morbid and slightly precocious child's effort to philosophize about time. I gather that is what Callender means for it to sound like.

I also gather, from only having skimmed the book, that Callender doesn't really present any other view of time more sophisticated than the one he starts off with. It IS a big invisible thing that will kill you. That is not so much what makes it "special," though, as a phenomenological way of stating its specialness.

As to what makes it special, Callender's answer seems to be: our humanity. He does talk about the kinds of experiences of time that individuals of other species may have, and seems to think of that as a worthy subject of further research, but not one on which much progress has been made.

"Perhaps time doesn't flow in any interesting sense for the lobster." It flows for us, though, so it is reasonable for us to identify the fact of its flow, the phenomenology of time, to the fact that we are human.

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