Christophe Bouton

If we reduce time to an a priori form of human intuition as Kant did, and if we think that time is nothing in itself and outside of the human subject, then how can we make sense of the age and history of earth or of the universe – a history going back far beyond the emergence of humanity? The issue to be decided is whether this objection can be raised against Kant without being guilty of anachronism, and to consider the possible answers that could be formulated. After considering the ideality of time, the aporias of the subjectivity of time and the idea of an indefiniteness of time as elaborated in the First Antinomy, this paper argues for the need to reassess the thesis of the absolute reality of time.

In this paper, I explore the young Foucault's engagement with phenomenology in his master's thesis, The Constitution of a Historical Transcendental in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I begin by outlining the context of this early work (Section 1), followed by a brief summary of the thesis and its overall argumentative structure (Section 2). In Section 3, I analyze Foucault's critique of Kant, which concerns not only Kant's ahistorical conception of the transcendental (3.1), but also the lack of critical reflection on the conditions of access to transcendental philosophy (3.2). Finally, I trace the emergence of the theme of the empirico–transcendental doublet in the 1949 thesis, and consider to what extent this notion applies to both Kant and Hegel (3.3).

Dans le prolongement de mon dernier ouvrage L’accélération de l’histoire (2022), je me propose de développer l’hypothèse – esquissée par Hartog (Chronos, 2020) et Chakrabarty (The climate of history in a planetary age, 2021) – selon laquelle on peut concevoir la notion controversée d’Anthropocène comme désignant l’émergence d’un nouveau régime d’historicité, le « régime d’historicité planétaire ou anthropocénique » (selon l’expression de Chakrabarty). Je commencerai par présenter les quatre éléments principaux qui, selon moi, constituent un régime d’historicité : un horizon d’attente et un espace d’expérience spécifiques, auxquels s’ajoutent un régime de temporalité et un régime de spatialité (I). J’examinerai ensuite les tentatives de penser le nouveau régime anthropocénique d’historicité avec des catégories tirées de régimes d’historicité plus anciens qui ne tiennent pas compte du caractère sans précédent de l’Anthropocène (II). Le temps de l’Anthropocène est une expérience inédite de l’histoire, caractérisée par la prise de conscience d’une menace planétaire et d’une urgence climatique (III). Il génère un nouveau rapport à l’espace (que j’appelle « eutopie »), dans un sens politique qu’il convient de clarifier (IV).

Christophe Bouton’s _Time and Freedom _addresses the problem of the relationship between time and freedom as a matter of practical philosophy, examining how the individual lives time and how her freedom is effective in time. Bouton first charts the history of modern philosophy’s reengagement with the Aristotelian debate about future contingents, beginning with Leibniz. While Kant, Husserl, and their followers would engage time through theories of knowledge, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Kierkegaard, and (later), Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas applied a phenomenological and existential methodology to time, but faced a problem of the temporality of human freedom. Bouton’s is the first major work of its kind since Bergson’s _Time and Free Will _(1889), and Bouton’s “mystery of the future,” in which the individual has freedom within the shifting bounds dictated by time, charts a new direction.

To what extent can the way we represent the nature of time in physics influence our conception of human freedom? The difficulty of this question is that a precise answer is not possible without raising two further questions: what freedom are we talking about? What area of physics are we thinking about? To investigate our problem, I will begin by clarifying the concept of freedom, which is, like that of time, a slippery problem (1). Then, I will tackle the question of its link with time in classical physics, starting from the philosophy of Kant, who considered freedom as a cosmological problem, that of the opposition – the “antinomy” – between human freedom and determinism (2). If this deterministic representation of the world, stemming from a certain reception of Newtonian physics, has been challenged by quantum mechanics, the question of whether quantum indeterminism is an argument in favor of freedom is controversial (3). The problem is further complicated by the theory of relativity, which has been interpreted by some proponents of the block universe view as “proof” in favor of a new form of determinism (4). Should we conclude from this that time, as understood by modern physics, is incompatible with any form of freedom?

Comme une locomotive lancée à toute allure qui aurait perdu son conducteur, l’histoire des sociétés occidentales se caractériserait, à partir du milieu du xviiie siècle, par une accélération exponentielle qui serait devenue hors de contrôle. On a là une vision de la modernité dont Hartmut Rosa est le représentant le plus connu et qui est aujourd’hui largement partagée.Durant ces dernières décennies, les effets destructeurs de l’activité humaine sur la planète ont augmenté à une vitesse spectaculaire. Mais une sorte d’inversion apparaît : la Nature, vue jadis comme lieu de la répétition, se trouve historicisée et même précipitée vers une fin, tandis que l’Histoire, lieu même du changement, semble étrangement stagnante.Associant étroitement histoire des concepts et réflexion sur la modernité, Christophe Bouton invite à une évaluation critique de ce récit de « l’accélération de l’histoire ». Qui sont ses défenseurs? Quelles sont les significations qu’elle revêt dans ses divers usages théoriques, pratiques et politiques? Vivons-nous vraiment à l’ère de l’accélération généralisée? Ne faut-il pas plutôt varier les perspectives en étant attentifs à d’autres expériences du temps historique, comme le souci du passé ou l’esprit de l’utopie, qui résistent à cette tendance de fond?

In this paper, I would like to show that Koselleck’s thesis on the dissolution of the topos historia magistra vitae in modernity is open to certain objections, to the extent that one finds in modernity a number of practical conceptions of history which are “useful for life”. My own thesis is that the topos of history as the “Guide to Life” is not so much dissolved as rather transformed with modernity, and in a sense which has to be specified. This point of view will be defended with reference to European authors of the nineteenth century, though I will add some observations on the twentieth century in the last part of the paper.

Im Jahre 1959 erschien die berühmte Schrift „Kritik und Krise' im Verlag Karl Alber. 62 Jahre später setzt sich dieser interdisziplinäre Sammelband das Ziel, die Rezeption des Koselleck‘schen Denkens auf internationaler Ebene zu studieren und das Spektrum der Themen und Perspektiven, in denen es angegangen wird, zu erweitern. Er bringt Spezialisten seines Werkes (Geschichtstheoretiker, Germanisten, Historiker, Philosophen usw.) zusammen, die ihre unterschiedlichen Lese- und Interpretationsweisen von Koselleck vorstellen und diskutieren sowie dabei seinen Beitrag und seine Originalität untersuchen.

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.

It is often claimed that the special theory of relativity (STR) necessitates the block universe view, according to which all the events spread out in space-time are determinate, ‘fixed’ once and for all. After having briefly recalled the basic notions of STR (principle of relativity, constancy of the speed of light, relativity of simultaneity) (Sect. 6.2), I will distinguish and discuss the different arguments taken from STR in favor of the block universe view: the ‘geometric argument’ (the spatialization of time) (Sect. 6.3), the ‘becoming-argument’ (the loss of the becoming) (Sect. 6.4), and the ‘determinateness-argument’ (the determinateness of the future) (Sect. 6.5). Among these, I will focus in particular on the last argument, which can be summarized as follows: STR entails this puzzling consequence that any future event in a given inertial reference frame is already present or past in another inertial reference frame. Any future event is therefore already determinate. I will show that this argument contains a fallacy, and present several replies to it. My conclusion is that the notion of time in STR does not necessarily imply the block universe view; rather, it gives rise to a new ontology that is more complex but nevertheless consistent.

Dans l'histoire de la philosophie, la question du temps a été abordée selon deux tendances opposées : le temps de la nature avec Aristote et le temps de la conscience avec Augustin. Ces deux formes irréductibles l'une à l'autre ont vu leur relation se complexifier, notamment avec la théorie de la relativité au début du XXe siècle, puis la mécanique quantique, qui ont bousculé notre perception et compréhension du temps. Cet ouvrage, écrit par des scientifiques et des philosophes, se concentre plus particulièrement sur le concept de " temps naturel ", examiné à la lumière de ses utilisations en sciences, qui semblent remettre en cause son unité. Physique, biologie, sciences cognitives, paléontologie, philosophie sont ici convoquées, chacune de ces disciplines disposant d'instruments spécifiques de mesure et de définition d'échelles de temps. Que nous apprennent-elles sur la " nature du temps ", sur ses propriétés comme la continuité ou l'irréversibilité? Quel statut doit-on donner aux différences entre les échelles utilisées pour observer les phénomènes? Telles sont quelques-unes des questions abordées dans ce livre, nouvelle incursion dans les mystères du temps.

This volume addresses the question of time from the perspective of the time of nature. Its aim is to provide some insights about the nature of time on the basis of the different uses of the concept of time in natural sciences. Presenting a dialogue between philosophy and science, it features a collection of papers that investigate the representation, modeling and understanding of time as they appear in physics, biology, geology and paleontology. It asks questions such as: whether or not the notions of time in the various sciences are reducible to the same physical time, what status should be given to timescale differences, or what are the specific epistemic issues raised by past facts in natural sciences. The book first explores the experience of time and its relation to time in nature in a set of chapters that bring together what human experience and physics enable metaphysicians, logicians and scientists to say about time. Next, it studies time in physics, including some puzzling paradoxes about time raised by the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. The volume then goes on to examine the distinctive problems and conceptions of time in the life sciences. It explores the concept of deep time in paleontology and geology, time in the epistemology of evolutionary biology, and time in developmental biology. Each scientific discipline features a specific approach to time and uses distinctive methodologies for implementing time in its models. This volume seeks to define a common language to conceive of the distinct ways different scientific disciplines view time. In the process, it offers a new approach to the issue of time that will appeal to a wide range of readers: philosophers and historians of science, metaphysicians and natural scientists - be they scholars, advanced students or readers from an educated general audience.

Quelle est la relation de l'esprit au temps? Comment s'articulent les concepts de temps et d'histoire? De quelle facon l'idee d'historicite se laisse-t-elle caracteriser? Telles sont les questions que cet ouvrage se propose d'adresser a la philosophie de Hegel. Alors que les essais de jeunesse (1796-1802) definissent le temps de maniere negative en l'identifiant au destin, puis a une marque de finitude que la raison doit abolir, les projets de systemes d'Iena constituent un tournant dans la recherche de Hegel, qui fait a cette epoque une decouverte decisive: celle de la nature eminemment dialectique du temps. L'analyse de la dialecticite du temps met en evidence les multiples facettes de ce concept, et explique comment l'esprit peut se reconcilier avec le temps dans sa figure proprement historique. Les lecons d'Iena saisissent la future philosophie de l'histoire dans sa possibilite, a la lumiere de ce qu'il convient d'appeler, depuis Hegel, l' historicite.

Hegel se réfère à l'ontologie traditionnelle essentiellement afin de définir, en relation à cette partie de la métaphysique, le projet original de la Science de la logique. L'ontologie traditionnelle à laquelle il pense est avant tout celle de Wolff, l'Ontologia, qu'il interprète comme « la théorie des déterminations abstraites de l'essence », c'est-à-dire l'exposition contingente de l'ensemble des concepts de l'entendement. Si la Science de la logique entend dépasser le caractère abstrait et formel de l'ontologie wolffienne, elle en reprend en même temps le principe qui l'anime, l'identité de la pensée et de l'être, et le réalise de manière absolue. Héritière critique de l'Ontologia, la Logique hégélienne est ainsi la science de l'être comme être pensé, comme Concept. Hegel refers to the traditional ontology essentially to define, in relation to this part of metaphysic, the original project of the Science of logic. The traditional ontology is for Hegel Wolff's Ontologia, which he interprets as « the doctrine of the abstract determinations of essence », i.e. as the contingent exposition of all the notions of Understanding. The Science of logic tries to supersede the abstract and formal characteristics of Wolff's ontology, but at the same time, it preserves the principle of this ontology, the identity of Thought and Being, and achieves it absolutely. Resulting from a critical interpretation of Ontologia, Hegel's logic is then the science of Being as Thought, as Notion.