Kant, Gödel and Relativity 1

Since the onset of logical positivism, the general wisdom of the philosophy of science has it that the kantian philosophy of (space and) time has been superseded by the theory of relativity, in the same sense in which the latter has replaced Newton’s theory of absolute space and time. On the wake of Cassirer and Gödel, in this paper I raise doubts on this commonplace. I first suggest some conditions that are necessary to defend the ideality of time in the sense of Kant, and I then bring to bear some contemporary physical theories on such conditions. 1 What is “the problem of time”? Time is absolutely central in our inner experience, but at least since the foundation of modern physics, it also plays an important role in the description of the outer world. To the extent that there is a physical and a mental time, one can safely surmise that the problem of trying to establish whether and how they are related is one of the most fundamental issues in the philosophy of time. Are physical and mental time in conflict, or we can regard the former as some sort of appropriate extension to the outer world of the main features of the latter? These questions, important as they are, already presuppose, however, that there are two sides of the problem, namely that there is, at a fundamental level of description, a physical time. Even independently of current physical speculations on the possibility that, within a quantum theory of gravity, spacetime could become a derived or an emergent notion, philosophers should ask questions that presuppose as little as possible preconceived answers. And given that the