This chapter introduces the key metaphysical concepts that are integral to understanding the nature of time. It also critically assesses the leading arguments in this intellectual landscape, arguing that there are compelling metaphysical reasons to endorse a B-theory or C-theory and reject all A-theories (particularly presentism, the growing block, and the moving spotlight).

This chapter uses Heidegger’s and Arendt’s joint reading in 1925 of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924) to argue that Heidegger’s lived literary practice in the 1920s does not match the invocations of poetic specialness that the philosopher theorizes from the mid 1930s onwards. Drawing on Heidegger’s letters to Arendt, as well as on the lecture courses from the mid 1920s which Heidegger used to clarify the arguments that became Being and Time, the chapter reconstructs Heidegger’s response to Mann’s novel. The episode suggests a counterfactual alternative mode of Heideggerian literary reading. Mann’s novel, as a model to think with, emphasizes the exchange with others and the competing discourses that resist grounding in a more fundamental viewpoint, such as the phenomenological ontology of the early Heidegger or the “thinking” of the later Heidegger. At the same time, the reading of Mann allows us to re-contextualize Heidegger’s engagement with his scientific and philosophical contemporaries, such as Einstein, Bergson, and Russell.

The meaning of time reversal can be reconstructed from the structure of time translations. "Instantaneous" time reversal is just its proxy in a state space representation.

Time reversal symmetry violation in the eletroweak interactions provides evidence for an asymmetry of time itself, given the Representation View.

The symmetries of time can be understood through the symmetries of motion, both in a sense that is familiar to philosophers andin the history of time reversal.

The structure of equilibrium thermodynamics, in harmony with statistical mechanics, does not contain a time asymmetry, except when it is trivially supplemented with one.

The conclusion reflects upon the ways in which British fictions of the not yet are experimenting with narrative form and philosophical content through a shared preoccupation with the question of time. In order to engage seriously with the alternative ways of being and becoming imagined in these novels, I argue that we need to refine a utopian strategy of reading that can identify ‘moments of possibility’ in literary texts that have not been written as works of utopian or science fiction. This expands discussions of literary utopianism beyond the limits of genre fiction. This strategy also needs to be able to conjoin such utopian moments into a broader political articulation. Connected in this way, the glimpses of utopian possibility that these British novels suggest can become networked into a non-contemporaneous model of time that brings our lived present into contact with multiple alternative pasts, presents and futures.