Matias Slavov

I earned my PhD in philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä in 2016, where I currently hold the title of docent. After that, I was a visiting researcher and lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles from 2017 to 2019. As a postdoctoral fellow funded by the Academy of Finland, I worked at Tampere University from 2020 to 2023. I have also undertaken shorter research visits to the Department of Philosophy at Stockholm University in spring 2015, and to the Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences at the University of Oslo in late 2022. Recently, I served as a substitute lecturer at the University of Oulu, and lately I have been teaching philosophy of science at LUT University.

I work on a naturalistically oriented philosophy of time. The title of my project is The Prospects of Eternalism (PoE).

It is well-known that relativity backs up eternalism, but our understanding of eternalism is nevertheless insufficient. i) Where did this approach come from? ii) Is it drastically in conflict with our every-day temporal experience? iii) Do the cuttingedge research programs in physics take it seriously? The combination of i, ii and iii is directed at the main question of PoE: is eternalism a cogent metaphysics of time? At this point we do not know, but a satisfactory answer would shed new light on the nature of temporal reality.

• David Hume
• History and philosophy of science
• Philosophy of time

Books:

Relational Passage of Time. New York: Routledge.

Hume's Natural Philosophy and Philosophy of Physical Science. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Journal articles:

    "Timekeeping Beyond Human Whim: A Critical Analysis of Strong Conventionalism about Clocks". Grazer Philosophische Studien.

    "Eternalism and Everettian Quantum Mechanics". Metaphysica.

    "Mach's Denial of Absolute Time". History of Philosophy Quarterly 40 (1), 85-104.

    "Eternalism and the Problem of Hyperplanes". Ratio 35 (2), 91-103.

    "Kaila's Interpretation of Einstein-Minkowski Invariance Theory". Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 93 (3), 57-65.

    "Hume's Thoroughly Relationist Ontology of Time". Metaphysica 22 (2), 173-88.

    "Eternalism and Perspectival Realism about the 'Now'". Foundations of Physics 50 (11), 1398-1410.

    "A Problem in Du Châtelet’s Metaphysical Foundations of Physics". History of Philosophy Quarterly 37 (1), 61-76.

    "Universal Gravitation and the (Un)Intelligibility of Natural Philosophy". Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (1), 129-57.

    "Time as an Empirical Concept in Special Relativity". The Review of Metaphysics 73 (2), 335-53.

    "Time Series and Nonreductive Physicalism". KronoScope: Journal for the Study of Time 19 (1), 25-38.

    "Hume on the Laws of Dynamics: The Tacit Assumption of Mechanism". Hume Studies 42 (1-2), 113-36.

    "Hume’s Fork and Mixed Mathematics". Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 99 (1), 102-19.

    "Newtonian and non-Newtonian Elements in Hume". Journal of Scottish Philosophy 14 (3), 275-96.

    "Empiricism and Relationism Intertwined: Hume and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity". Theoria 31 (2), 247-63.

    "Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation and Hume’s Concept of Causality". Philosophia Naturalis 50 (2), 277-305.

Chapters/Entries:

     “Eternalism”. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ISSN 2161-0002.

     "Newton and Hume". Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Cham: Springer.

     "Hume, The Philosophy of Science and the Scientific Tradition". The Humean Mind, 388-402. New York: Routledge.

Outreach:

     "Time Passes". The Philosophers' Magazine: https://philosophersmag.com/time-passes/.

     "No Absolute Time". Aeon: https://aeon.co/essays/what-albert-einstein-owes-to-david-humes-notion-of-time.