Introduction: Time Between Metaphysics and Natural Sciences: From Physics to Biology (original) (raw)

Although each scientific discipline has a specific approach to time and distinctive methodologies for implementing time in their models, pervasive issues about time still arise in all sciences, like the reality of time, the measurement of time, the definition of irreversibility and reversibility (time's arrow), the status of the past, the notion of timescale, etc. In this introductive chapter, we claim that a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to time as it is used and represented in the natural sciences would be the most appropriate way to deal with these issues in order to provide a philosophical understanding of the time of nature. In the natural sciences, time is a crucial dimension of physics. However, we stress that "time in physics" is something of an abstraction, since "the physics" itself is nowadays a set of different disciplines working with heterogeneous models, assumptions, and experimental settings. Because of this disparity, several perspectives on time and time paradoxes emerge from various fields in physics. In addition to the controversies about the time in physics, we argue that geology, paleontology and biology should be included in the philosophical assessment of the nature of time: within these sciences, time indeed displays different properties, is investigated using very different methods and tools, and raise specific problems, many of them due to the fact that evolutionary theory is the current framework for much of biological investigation. Finally, this interdisciplinary approach leads to the question of the univocal or pluralist nature of the concept of time, which is raised in the conclusion of the chapter.