Dr. Matias Slavov

I work on a naturalistically oriented philosophy of time. The title of my ongoing project is The Prospects of Eternalism (PoE). It is well known that relativity lends strong support to eternalism. Yet our understanding of eternalism remains incomplete. PoE addresses three central questions: i) Where did this approach come from? ii) Is it drastically in conflict with our everyday temporal experience? iii) Do the cutting-edge research programs in physics take it seriously?

PoE is funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

Selected publications

Books
(2022) Relational Passage of Time. New York: Routledge.

(2020) Hume’s Natural Philosophy and Philosophy of Physical Science. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Journal articles
(Forthcoming) "Timekeeping Beyond Human Whim: A Critical Analysis of Strong Conventionalism about Clocks". Grazer Philosophische Studien.

(2025) "Eternalism and Everettian Quantum Mechanics". Metaphysica 26 (2), 199-212.

(2023) "Mach’s Denial of Absolute Time". History of Philosophy Quarterly 40 (1), 85-104.

(2022) "Eternalism and the Problem of Hyperplanes". Ratio 35 (2), 91-103.

(2022) "Kaila’s Interpretation of Einstein-Minkowski Invariance Theory". Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 93 (3), 57-65.

(2021) "Hume’s Thoroughly Relationist Ontology of Time". Metaphysica 22 (2), 173-88.

(2020) "Eternalism and Perspectival Realism about the 'Now'". Foundations of Physics 50 (11), 1398-1410.

(2020) "A Problem in Du Châtelet's Metaphysical Foundations of Physics". History of Philosophy Quarterly 37 (1), 61-76.

(2020) "Universal Gravitation and the (Un)Intelligibility of Natural Philosophy". Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (1), 129-57.

(2019) "Time as an Empirical Concept in Special Relativity". The Review of Metaphysics 73 (2), 335-53.

(2019) "Time Series and Nonreductive Physicalism". KronoScope: Journal for the Study of Time 19 (1), 25-38.

(2018) "Hume on the Laws of Dynamics: The Tacit Assumption of Mechanism". Hume Studies 42 (1-2), 113-36.

(2017) "Hume’s Fork and Mixed Mathematics". Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 99 (1), 102-19.

(2016) "Newtonian and non-Newtonian Elements in Hume". Journal of Scottish Philosophy 14 (3), 275-96.

(2016) "Empiricism and Relationism Intertwined: Hume and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity". Theoria 31 (2), 247-63.

(2013) "Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation and Hume’s Concept of Causality". Philosophia Naturalis 50 (2), 277-305.

Chapters/Entries/Proceedings
(2025) "Can You Endorse Four-Dimensionalism without Comitting to Eternalism?" In Forsman Jan & Slavov Matias (eds.) Contemporary Perspectives and Historical Dimensions: A Festschrift in Honor of Jani Hakkarainen, 118-131.

(2024) "Eternalism". The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002.

(2022) "Hume’s Metaphysics and Critique of Metaphysics". Proceedings of the 48th Annual Hume Society Conference Prague, 213-222.

(2020) "Newton and Hume". Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Cham: Springer.

(2018) "Hume, The Philosophy of Science and the Scientific Tradition". The Humean Mind, 388-402. New York: Routledge.

Reviews
(2025) Review of Adrian Bardon’s book A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time (second edition). Metascience 33, 447-450.

(2023) Review of Heather Dyke’s element Time. Philosophy 98 (2), 243-248.

(2021) Review of Hsueh Qu’s book Hume’s Epistemological Evolution. The Philosophical Quarterly 71 (4).

(2019) "Review of David Landy’s book Hume's Science of Human Nature. Philosophy in Review 39 (3), 137-139.

(2019) "Review of Carlo Rovelli’s book The Order of Time. European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 15 (1), 71-76.

(2017) Review of Tamas Demeter’s book David Hume and the Culture of Scottish Newtonianism. Journal of Early Modern Studies 6 (1), 207-12.

Outreach
"Time Passes". The Philosophers’ Magazine.

"No Absolute Time". Aeon.

Finnish publications
I have co-edited the first Finnish textbook on contemporary metaphysics, Metafysiikan perusteet (Gaudeamus 2026), together with my colleague Jani Hakkarainen. My Finnish papers can be found here.

Full list of publications
Here.