Philosophy and Deep Time

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Humans typically live less than a hundred years; our memories unfold over much shorter timescales; and the written records of human experience only provide evidence about things that have happened within the last 5000 years. Nonetheless, many scientific discoveries are concerned with events that lie beyond the boundaries of human memory and written records; and cosmologists, geologists, paleontologists, archeologists, and evolutionary biologists must routinely appeal to events that occurred thousands, millions—and sometimes even billions—of years ago! Learning how to think in terms of ‘Deep Time’, as these scientists do, is no easy task. But philosophers and scientists have developed numerous intriguing strategies for doing so. In this class, we will examine some of these strategies. We will ask what science can teach us about deep past. And we will think critically about claims regarding geological formations, the origins of life, the lives of dinosaurs, and the processes that produced Homo sapiens. Along the way, we will also explore the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of thinking about “Deep Time”. And we will consider the possibility that a perspective based upon an understanding of Deep Time can help us to transform our moral psychology, by highlighting the uniqueness of the ‘Anthropocene’ as well as the unique features of the mass extinction that is currently underway.