May 7, 2022 – A. N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality can be read as a sustained meditation on Locke’s characterization of time as ‘perpetual perishing.’ But he refuses to see time solely as an occasion of perishing. Colapietro has seized the occasion itself to reflect on time and tragedy. Is time by its very nature tragic, entailing the irrevocable loss of whatever emerges and, for a time, endures in its flux? Or is time a site wherein forms of ‘immortality’ are attainable? But of even more basic concern are several different senses of time, above all, the time envisioned by the most influential physicists (including Einstein) and the conception of time implicit in the activity of physicists themselves. Are physicists in time in the same sense that they so often conceive time (specifically, time as a reversible process or even an illusory phenomenon)? That is, is the dominant understanding of time among theoretical physicists compatible with what physicists do as agents? Colapietro argues that agential time is an irreducible phenomenon and any attempt to explain it away (or to render it illusory) is mistaken.

Vincent Colapietro is Liberal Arts Research Professor Emeritus at the Pennsylvania State University. He has written on a wide range of topics, from music (especially jazz) and cinema to psychoanalysis and deconstruction, from art and literature to ontology and phenomenology.

Length: 2 hours