The Darwinian revolution in the concept of time
pp. 383-401
in: Fraser, Francis C. Haber, Gert H. Müller (eds), The study of time, Berlin, Springer, 1972Abstract
The mathematical view of time as a uniform line of successive instants extending from a beginning to some indefinite point in the future is embedded in the metaphysical assumptions of historians today. All historical chronology is based upon it. Although the historian might insist that he is only concerned with existences in the past, rather than with time, and that if the record were complete, he could reconstruct the order of events by putting them edge to edge, the fact is that he accepts the public time given to us by the astronomers as a coordinate for the ordering of events. Whether he thinks of this time as a reified existence or as a heuristic tool, the result is the same for the practice of history at the empirical level of establishing dates and chronologies for events. It is against this mathematical time that he measures rates of change in history and applies terms such as revolution or evolution for series of events. Furthermore, no matter how relational the historian in his philosophical moments may think of chronological time, to some degree it is reified in his thinking when he is doing historical research and writing. In a period of revolution, for instance, it would never occur to him that time had accelerated or was foreshortened, even though he might use some such expressions.