Dr. Matias Slavov

I work on a naturalistically oriented philosophy of time. The title of my project is The Prospects of Eternalism (PoE). It is well-known that relativity backs up eternalism, but our understanding of eternalism is nevertheless insufficient. i) Where did this approach come from? ii) Is it drastically in conflict with our every-day temporal experience? iii) Do the cutting-edge research programs in physics take it seriously?

My research 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) "About time, concisely". Metascience 33, 447-450.

(2023) "Time". Philosophy 98 (2), 243-248.

(2021) "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.

Other stuff
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.