In this paper, I provide the first in-depth discussion of Susan Stebbing’s views concerning our experience of the passage of time – a key issue for many metaphysicians writing in the first half of the twentieth century. I focus on Stebbing’s claims about the passage of time in Philosophy and the Physicists and her disagreement with Arthur Eddington over how best to account for that experience. I show that Stebbing’s concern is that any attempt to provide a scientific account of (...) the passage of time will face problems, since the events described by physics are necessarily measured against the passage of time. I then identify views elsewhere in her philosophical corpus that can help shed light on this claim. Ultimately, I argue, Stebbing’s views on time should be construed as part of her wider commitment to ‘realism’. To be a realist, for Stebbing, is to accept a set of propositions which are a pre-requisite for even beginning to analyse the world around us. For Stebbing, I argue, part of what it means to be a realist is to accept our experience of the passage of time as something fundamental that cannot itself be subject to analysis. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the French philosopher Henri Bergson was a hidden interlocutor in Susan Stebbing’s critique of Arthur Eddington in her Philosophy and the Physicists. First, we outline Stebbing’s critique of Eddington’s philosophical- physical writings with a particular emphasis on her case against Eddington’s account of the passage of time. Second, we provide evidence that Eddington’s philosophy is, at its core, Bergsonian and make the case that Eddington was directly influenced by Bergson’s philosophy of la durée. Third, (...) we lay out Stebbing’s critique of Bergsonism in her Pragmatism and French Voluntarism and identify important similarities with her critique of Eddington over twenty years later. In doing so, we show that it is Eddington’s Bergsonism that she is attacking. Finally, we situate Stebbing’s criticisms of both Eddington and Bergson within two wider conflicts that emerged in early twentieth century British philosophy: one between an objectively describable time of physics and subjective temporal experience, and the other between science and intuition. (shrink)