Thomas Sattig's "How Time Passes"

Thomas Sattig is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Tübingen. From 2002 to 2005, he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford. Sattif has held tenure-track positions as Assistant Professor at Tulane University and at Washington University in St. Louis. He has been a regular Visiting Professor at USI, Lugano since 2019.

Sattig applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, How Time Passes, and shared the following:

As regards page 99. It is the first page of Part B of the book, in which I turn from the passage of time in the physical world to the passage of time in human experience. The page is the break of dawn after a dark night. At this point in the journey, it is clear that Part A's project of finding the dynamic aspect of time in the physical world has failed. We are about to embark on Part B’s project of locating the source of time's passage, which separates time from space, in our conscious experiences of the world. The latter project will turn out to succeed. But page 99 itself does not yet convey an idea of the new project. It just contains a summary of preliminaries.

That is, page 99 is significant. But its significance does not concern its content. Its significance concerns its physical location in the book. Does this mean that the Page 99 Test fails in this case? You tell me!

Learn more about How Time Passes at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue