Ph.D. Thesis:
Time, change and construction

on some contributions to a modern reconstruction of the metaphysics of time. Niels Viggo Hansen, Dept. of Philosophy, Univ. of Aarhus, 2001.

Resumé på dansk

The Ph.D. thesis consists of a series of original papers that can be read separately, some of them are also published separately. But they also make up an overall flow and argument. 

1. Introduction
   An opening to the following contemplations of “what it is to be a proces” – and an overview of the classical and modern landscape of views and arguments on the nature of time that it will seek to reframe rather than take a position in.
   
   
2. Process, substance and irreversibility
   Time seems to flow one way and not the reverse. Can we make sense of “the arrow of time”?
   
   
3. The development of an idea of process
   How Whitehead and other process thinkers gave systematic expression to an undercurrent in our conception of time and change
   
   
4. Process thought, teleology and thermodynamics
   The second law of thermodynamics may be an expression, rather than a contradition, of a wildly self-organizing and order-inventing cosmos.
   
   
5. Interpretations of the historicity of objects
   Modern science is not just ABOUT a world of autopoiesis and participation, it is itself a participant. Constructivist analyses of this entaglement (Latour and others) have been critizised for abandoning realism. I argue that this objection holds only as long as the entanglement is not conceived radically enough.
   
   
6. Spacetime and becoming
   Einstein and others thought that the theories of relativity contradict a dynamic understanding of time (“passage”). But if we replace classical “substance” notions of time with a process understanding, the temporal conditions of special relativity become a natural consequence of dynamic change and becoming.
   
   
7. Resources of radical affirmative constructivism
   Although Latour and Deleuze often speak of Hegel as the philosophical arch enemy, they share a basic affirmative approach to science-and-nature as self-inventive, immanently critical process.
   
   
8. Deriving nature from first principles
   How may speculative philosophy of nature and science be meaningful today?
   
   
9. Conclusion
   Nature and science as adventure.
   
   
10. Reintroduction
    Metaphysics is a kind of politics – a way of negotiating and organizing our shared habitation of nature and history. All of the above can be read again in that light
    
    
11. Resumé på Dansk
    
    
12. Bibliography