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Tampere University
matias.slavov [at] tuni.fi (matias[dot]slavov[at]tuni[dot]fi)

About me

I obtained my PhD from University of Jyväskylä in 2016, where I'm also an adjunct professor (title of docent). In 2017-19 I was a visiting scholar at UCLA's Philosophy Department. I worked as an Academy of Finland postdoctoral fellow here at Tampere University in 2020-2023. I have done shorter research visits to Stockholm University in spring 2015 and at the end of 2022 I was part of the Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences at the University of Oslo.

Research fields

  • David Hume
  • History and philosophy of science
  • Philosophy of time

Funding

Currently the Finnish Cultural Foundation

Selected publications

Books:

Relational Passage of Time. New York: Routledge.

Hume's Natural Philosophy and Philosophy of Physical Science. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

 

Journal articles:

    "Mach's Denial of Absolute Time". History of Philosophy Quarterly 40 (1), 85-104.

    "Eternalism and the Problem of Hyperplanes". Ratio 35 (2), 91-103.

    "Kaila's Interpretation of Einstein-Minkowski Invariance Theory". Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 93 (3), 57-65.

    "Hume's Thoroughly Relationist Ontology of Time". Metaphysica 22 (2), 173-88.

    "Eternalism and Perspectival Realism about the 'Now'". Foundations of Physics 50 (11), 1398-1410.

    "A Problem in Du Châtelet’s Metaphysical Foundations of Physics". History of Philosophy Quarterly 37 (1), 61-76.

    "Universal Gravitation and the (Un)Intelligibility of Natural Philosophy". Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (1), 129-57.

    "Time as an Empirical Concept in Special Relativity". The Review of Metaphysics 73 (2), 335-53.

    "Time Series and Nonreductive Physicalism". KronoScope: Journal for the Study of Time 19 (1), 25-38.

    "Hume on the Laws of Dynamics: The Tacit Assumption of Mechanism". Hume Studies 42 (1-2), 113-36.

    "Hume’s Fork and Mixed Mathematics". Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 99 (1), 102-19.

    "Newtonian and non-Newtonian Elements in Hume". Journal of Scottish Philosophy 14 (3), 275-96.

    "Empiricism and Relationism Intertwined: Hume and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity". Theoria 31 (2), 247-63.

    "Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation and Hume’s Concept of Causality". Philosophia Naturalis 50 (2), 277-305.

 

Chapters/Entries:

    “Eternalism”. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ISSN 2161-0002.

     "Newton and Hume". Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Cham: Springer.

    "Hume, The Philosophy of Science and the Scientific Tradition". The Humean Mind, 388-402. New York: Routledge.

 

Outreach:

    "No Absolute Time". Aeon: https://aeon.co/essays/what-albert-einstein-owes-to-david-humes-notion-of-time