Whitehead and the Philosophy of Time

Summary

In this paper I examine the approach of philosophers and others interested in describing our direct human experience of time, and the difficulties involved in reconciling such descriptions of time, with those given by scientists. The views of Merleau-Ponty and Husserl are compared with those of Whitehead. I consider Whitehead’s attempt by means of his Method of Extensive Abstraction to bridge the gap between the time of human experience and that of science, and examine the cogency of Grünbaum’s criticism of this method. I discuss Whitehead’s account of congruence, which for him is connected with our recognition of sameness or uniformity. I next consider Whitehead’s views on simultaneity and Northrop’s and Grünbaum’s criticisms of them, and point out that Whitehead was concerned with simultaneity in sense-experience rather than instantaneousness in physics, and that his account of simultaneity is an epistemological rather than a causal one. I conclude that Whitehead, unlike Grünbaum, does not believe that there is necessarily an isomorphism between the structure of the mathematical continuum and that of physical time.