Emily Thomas

Emily Thomas is a Professor in Philosophy at Durham University. Prior to this she obtained a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and held a NWO grant at the University of Groningen. She has published widely on the history of metaphysics, especially space and time. She is the author of several monographs, and in 2020 she won a Leverhulme Prize for excellence in research.

Abstract: This grant will help me pursue work on two inter-related papers: studying time in the metaphysics of Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) and Arthur Oncken Lovejoy (1873-1962). Within 1900s-1920s American philosophy, these two wrote more on time than any others. They belonged to very different traditions: Calkins, a practising experimental psychologist and Absolute idealist; Lovejoy, an intellectual historian, and philosophic critic. Yet both studied with William James and Josiah Royce at Harvard, reacting to their work; both evinced a penchant for Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time; and both defended the reality of time in a period when this view was unfashionable. Ultimately, this work will feed into a trade book on the history of time.