Fragmenting Reality: An Essay on Passage, Causality and Time Travel

Description

The growing interest in fragmentalism is one of the most exciting trends in philosophy of time and is gradually reshaping the contemporary debate. Providing an extensive interpretation of this view, Samuele Iaquinto and Giuliano Torrengo articulate a novel theory of the passage of time and argue that it is the most effective in vindicating the inherent dynamism of reality. Iaquinto and Torrengo offer the first full-range application of fragmentalism to a number of metaphysical topics, including the open future, causation, the A-theoretic interpretation of special relativity and time travel. The resulting picture, they argue, conveys the potential of a radically new understanding of time.

Samuele Iaquinto is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Education at the University of Turin, Italy. Giuliano Torrengo is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan, Italy.

This book is an excellent in-depth investigation of fragmentalism when it comes to the nature of time. For the first time it takes up, in a sustained way, the task of exploring fragmentalist accounts of time, and in particular, of temporal passage. I highly recommend this challenging book to anyone who is interested in seeing research into the nature of time, and passage, pushed beyond the current state of the debate into something new and exciting. * Kristie Miller, Professor of Philosophy, The University of Sydney, Australia * Fragmenting Reality is a rigorous, comprehensive defense of flow fragmentalism, the view that each time is a fundamentally different fragment of reality. Iaquinto's and Torrengo's cutting-edge view is creatively developed and finely drawn, and it has broad applications to problems in metaphysics and the philosophy of science. Every metaphysician will benefit from reading this book. * Sara Bernstein, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, USA * Iaquinto and Torrengo's research is at the cutting edge of philosophical debates concerning time and change. In this excellent new book, they provide both an introduction to the state of the art in contemporary metaphysics of time, and carefully describe and defend their own innovative theory of Flow Fragmentalism. I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in contemporary metaphysics of time. * Daniel Esmonde Deasy, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Ireland *