Whitrow’s Natural Philosophy of Time in History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Monday 09 June 2025 is the 113th anniversary of the birth of Gerald James Whitrow (9 June 1912–2 June 2000), better known to posterity as G. J. Whitrow, who was born at Kimmeridge in Dorset, on the English Channel, on this date in 1912.
I consider Whitrow’s book The Natural Philosophy of Time to be one of the best books available on the philosophy of time, and in several episodes I’ve emphasized the need to bridge the disconnect between the philosophy of time and the philosophy of history. This episode is part of that effort to bridge the disconnect. Whitrow also wrote a popular book covering much the same ground is less detail, which has been published both as What is Time? And The Nature of Time. What distinguishes Whitrow’s book is that Whitrow has a detailed knowledge relativity and cosmology as well as philosophy of time, and this makes possible a comprehensive survey of both scientific and philosophical conceptions of time, and the attempt to bring these two traditions of thought about time into dialogue.
Even though Whitrow draws broadly from both science and philosophy, and his survey is much better than most attempted surveys, his book isn’t complete or exhaustive. For example, Whitrow doesn’t mention Husserl or phenomenological analyses of time, and there are times in reading the book that I think the exposition could have been improved, and the argument advanced, if he had integrated phenomenology as effectively as he discussed the views of time of idealist philosophies like F. H. Bradley and J. M. E. McTaggart. But I could argue that there’s a good reason Whitrow discussed idealist philosophies of time in Bradley and McTaggart. Many scientists have used scientific theories of time to deny the reality of time, just as idealist philosophers have used their theories of time to deny the reality of time. This is a strange correspondence between contemporary science and traditional philosophy that we find both in philosophical scientists and scientific philosophers, which shows us that this correspondence of natural science and idealist philosophy isn’t mere coincidence; it follows from presuppositions about the nature of the world.
Kurt Gödel, whom I will here count as a philosophical scientist, wrote a technical paper on the possibility of time travel in relativistic universes and, in another paper on relativity theory and idealistic philosophy, said:
“…if relativity theory gives a correct description of reality, the assumption that at any moment of time only a certain portion of the facts composing the world exists objectively is wrong, i.e., there exists no objective change and no objective lapse of time.”
Gödel Cites McTaggart in a footnote to this passage, noting that the denial of the reality of time has been a commonplace in philosophy. And Bertrand Russell, whom I will count as a scientific philosopher, said, “Both in thought and feeling, even though time be real, to realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.” (Mysticism and Logic, p. 22) Russell also wrote, and in the passage quoted by Whitrow:
“…there is some sense — easier to feel than to state — in which time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential to philosophic thought.”
So even as Russell railed against what he called traditional metaphysics with its denial of time, he confirmed the judgment of the devaluation of time found in all these traditional philosophies that deny the reality of time.
A denial of the reality of time is, at the same time, a denial of the reality of history, though we don’t often find the denial of the reality of time coupled with an explicit denial of history — I think because of the disconnect between the philosophy of time and the philosophy of history. But acceptance of any of the supervenience theses that I formulated in my episode on Reichenbach entails the denial of history following from the denial of time. Whitrow calls the denial of the reality of time the eliminationist position, and he begins The Natural Philosophy of Time with a distinction between the view of time as eliminable and the view of time as irreducible. This distinction runs throughout the book, along with a roughly parallel distinction between being and becoming.
Time is understood to be irreducible to anything else, for example, not reducible to a static four-dimensional model of the universe, when genuine becoming occurs, or, I could say, when becoming is not reducible to being in any form. Whitrow ends by taking sides on the distinction between eliminationism and irreducibility in the final sentence of the book:
“The idea that time is… ultimate and irreducible does not… commit us to the unnecessary hypothesis that time is absolute in the Newtonian sense, for moments do not exist in their own right, but are merely sets of co-existent events. Nor is time a mysterious illusion of the intellect. It is an essential feature of the universe.”
This settles the distinction between the view of time as eliminable or irreducible in favor the latter, but while Whitrow could see that irreducibility of time doesn’t commit us to absolute Newtonian time, he apparently didn’t see that the punctiform present doesn’t commit us to universal simultaneity, which is another way to conceptualize absolute Newtonian time. In several passages of The Natural Philosophy of Time Whitrow criticizes the idea of the punctiform present, which I previously discussed in my episode on George Herbert Mead. Whitrow usually calls this the “knife-edge” or “moving knife-edge” present, and in fact the term “punctiform” never appears in the book, but the idea is there under other terms. The conclusion of the book gives five arguments against the punctiform present, which shows you that the idea loomed large for Whitrow. Particularly interesting to me is the first paragraph of Chapter IV on relativistic time, in which he gives what I would call a “just so” story of the origins of the punctiform present, concluding:
“Depending on the abstract concept of ideally precise observation, there arose the idea that time is a ‘moving knife-edge’, not restricted to any particular place but covering all places simultaneously.”
Here Whitrow has tied the punctiform present to the idea of universal simultaneity, which latter he discusses in some detail because the theory of relativity denies universal simultaneity. Whitrow writes:
“In the present century the classical idea of universal time as a simple moving knife-edge covering all places and observers at the same instant has been replaced by Einstein’s strict localization of the concept of simultaneity and his postulate of the world-wide invariance, at least in the absence of an appreciable gravitational field, of the velocity of light in vacuo…”
But none of this bears upon whether the internal time-consciousness of every individual is a knife-edge or punctiform present. There’s no need to tie the punctiform present to universal simultaneity, and I don’t think there’s any good reason to connect the idea of the punctiform present to ideally precise observation. I’ll concede that the argument could be made, but I’m not going to take that argument up today, though I hope to return to it at some point, because I think it’s wrapped up with a cluster of related ideas and misapprehensions about time and our understanding of time. Even though I disagree with it, I find Whitrow’s analysis to be both valuable and clarifying. It’s worth noting that a lot of philosophical attempts at the exposition of a concept aren’t clarifying, but only further muddy the waters, as I implied in my previous episode on thinking. Whitrow’s philosophical expositions are always clarifying, which is one of the reasons I value his book as I do.
Whitrow also wrote Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day, and the Preface to this book he says that it can be understood as a supplement to The Natural Philosophy of Time. The two books are companion pieces, as it were, and while The Natural Philosophy of Time is more philosophically interesting, Time in History explicitly discusses philosophies of history, which the other book does not. Another distinction appears in Time in History between a conception of time in terms of instants and a conception of time in terms of duration. This distinction is implicitly tied to discussions in The Natural Philosophy of Time, where he seems to have already overcome this distinction in formulations that involve both instants and durations:
“The linear continuum of instants constructed from overlapping durations by the method discussed in the previous chapter was shown to possess the important property that the initial durations correspond to intervals of this continuum.”
This is, again, from the first paragraph of Chapter IV. The preceding Chapter III on mathematical time can only be appreciated by reading it through; I can’t realistically give a summary of it here. Despite the detailed treatment in the earlier book, the distinction between instant and duration re-asserts itself in the eighteenth century, during the Enlightenment, when, we could say, the modern world was coming into being. Whitrow writes in Time in History:
“In the eighteenth century… there was a general revolt against the idea of the instant as the basic temporal concept. Instead, it came to be appreciated that our experience of time is dualistic: intensity of sensation is associated with the instant, but our awareness of the multiplicity of sensation depends on duration.”
If the question is whether it is the instant or the duration that’s the “basic” concept of time, we can imagine the two concepts as being inter-definable, one in terms of the other or vice versa, so that it’s a matter of convention as to which we take as fundamental or axiomatic in a given theory of time. This can illuminate history, since whether we take the instant or the duration as the fundamental temporal concept will shape how we conceptualize history, whether as a sequence of instants or as a series of durations laid end to end. We can even conceptualize the distinction between diachronic and synchronic history either way. A diachronic history, sometimes called history through time, naturally lends itself to an exposition in terms of a sequence of instants, since diachrony is about succession, but a sequence of instants adds up to a duration, which is an historical period, and a diachronic history sets a series of periods or durations end to end. On the other hand, synchronic history, sometimes called history across time, naturally lends itself to an exposition in terms of duration, since synchrony is about interaction within the present, and the present needs to have the thickness of some minimal duration for any interaction to occur, but this duration could be ideally reduced to an instant, and the big picture of history is then the sequence of these synchronic instants. In this way we see how different fundamental conceptions of time bear upon our conception of history.
At the end of the book Whitrow writes, “…just as our idea of history is based on that of time, so time as we conceive it is a consequence of our history.” (p. 186) This I can whole-heartedly endorse, since it implies that philosophy of time and philosophy of history need to learn from each other. I said earlier that Whitrow attempts to bring the scientific and philosophical traditions of the study of time into dialogue. Another way to put this would be to say that the scientific treatment of time in Whitrow’s The Natural Philosophy of Time keeps the book relevant to the ordinary conceptions of time held by those who formulate calendars, measure time, build clocks, and count off days. One way to put this in philosophical terms is that the scientific treatment of philosophies of time gives an operational understanding of time.
What’s an operational understanding of time? More generally, what’s operationalism? The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy defines operationalism as, “…a program in the philosophy of science that aims to interpret scientific concepts via experimental procedures and observational outcomes.” We could also call this the concretization of abstract concepts. It’s easy to see the relationship of operationalism to pragmatism, behaviorism, and verificationism in logical empiricism. Opertionalism is not without its critics. Mario Bunge in his Dictionary of Philosophy wrote:
“Because of its attempt to subject theory to measurement technique, operationism has had a crippling effect on the natural sciences, in banning high-level constructs that could not possibly be linked to laboratory operations. But for a while it had a beneficial effect on social studies, in discrediting wild speculation. Nowadays operationism survives only in the first few pages of some science textbooks.”
But when I characterize Whitrow’s work as operationalist I’m not insisting on anything systematic or dogmatic, but rather an effort to make recondite concepts more concrete by demonstrating their practical application and implications. Philosophies of time have practical implications for science, and the scientific study of time has practical implications for the construction of clocks, and the construction of clocks has practical implications for the perception of historical time in a society in which clocks are in everyday use.
The opertionalist theme is continued in Whitrow’s Time in History, but instead of scientific theories of time being the operational expression of philosophy of time, in Time in History the mechanics of clocks and calendars is the operational expression of philosophies of history, and, we could say, historical time is the operational expression of the use of clocks and calendars. And we can use this theme of operationalism to connect the two books, since clocks and calendars can be understood as the operational expression of scientific theories of time. We could say that a scientific conception of time provides the “mechanics” of time. This is true literally when scientific theories of time are applied to the construction of clocks, so there’s a transitive operationalist relationship between scientific and philosophical theories of time in The Natural Philosophy of Time, between clocks and historical time in Time in History, and between the themes of the two books, so that philosophy of time is expressed operationally in scientific theories of time, scientific theories of time are expressed operationally in clocks and calendars, and clocks and calendars are expressed operationally in an effective lived experience of historical time. At each stage in this transitive relationship the concepts of time and history become more concrete.
The combination of scientific theories of time and technological chronometry has, arguably, created the world we live in today, in which everything is scheduled and planned. This is one of the themes of Time in History, especially in Chapter 9 on “Time and History in the Eighteenth Century” and Chapter 10 on “Evolution and the Industrial Revolution.” Science has created a regime of precise timekeeping that has been used to organize the whole of society, or, at least, the whole of Western society. Western history is now, in turn, an expression of precision calendrics and chronometry. This represents a break with the past as decisive as any of the revolutions that constituted the modern world, and this break grew out of the scientific revolution, which provided the knowledge, and the industrial revolution, which provided the engineering, to make time and history precise and calculable.
We might well ask if it was this relentless operationalism of time and history that drove the disenchantment of the world, since there’s little that’s more disenchanting than a timeclock and a schedule. Before the industrial revolution, the immediacy of the agricultural calendar dictated the course of the day and the year. Spring was a time of plowing and planting. Summer was a time of gathering. Fall was a time of harvest and “wintering in,” And winter was a period of enforced idleness. In the farthest northern reaches of European civilization, the farmers of Scandinavia put their domestic animals into barns when the winter came and fed them off stored fodder until they could be let out again it the spring. Nothing so extreme took place in Greece or Italy, homelands of Western civilization, but these are still temperate climates with seasonal changes.
One of the most interesting ethnographic museums I’ve ever visited, and I’ve visited a lot of them, was the folk museum at Gura Humorului in northern Romania — The Museum of Folk Customs of Bucovina (Muzeul Obiceiurilor Populare din Bucovina) — where the collection was displayed in a sequence that followed the year, so that each season in the traditional agricultural calendar had its associated religious festival. The coupling of agriculture and religion gave meaning to the year and to the activities of each season. There was a similar coupling of hunting and gathering with religion in the lives of pre-agricultural nomads, although the religious beliefs and the ritual observances were different. Joseph Campbell has discussed these conditions in his recorded lectures, especially his lectures on Native American myths.
In the industrialized world today the agricultural sector employs only about two or three percent of the total workforce, and even these jobs have become industrialized. The farmer in possession of industrialized technology doesn’t have the same relationship to the land as his ancestors, although he’s still much closer to the land than the urban office worker whose food comes from a grocery store. The vast bulk of the population of industrialized nation-states has become separated from, and therefore indifferent to, the agriculture that keeps them alive. Many are entirely comfortable with knowing nothing about the source of their food, but many feel this as a form of alienation from the natural rhythms of life, and this is one of the sources of the repeated appearance of back-to-the-land movements that I mentioned in my episode on J. Glenn Gray. All of this is implicit in Whitrow’s account of time after industrialization, but I’ve expanded on it and given it my own emphasis. Whitrow’s discussions in both books are gratifyingly detailed, and I recommend them as essential reading in the philosophy of time.
