Christian Wuthrich

Biography

Christian Wuthrich is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Geneva. His research focuses on the philosophical foundations of quantum gravitation. With Nick Huggett (University of Illinois, Chicago), he is currently writing a book under contract with Oxford University Press entitled Out of Nowhere: The Emergence of Spacetime in Quantum Theories of Gravity. From September 2015 to August 2018, they launched a major project entitled Space and Time after Quantum Gravitation funded by the John Templeton Foundation at both the Chicago and Geneva centers. The joint activities of this project are described in the Beyond Spacetime blog. More generally, Christian Wuthrich works on metaphysics and the general philosophy of science. More specifically, he works on space and time, time travel, persistence, identity, the laws of nature, determinism and causality.

Conference: Was there a time before time?

Time, it seems, emerges from the atemporal. Models of quantum cosmology suggest that this emergence links time and the atemporal both inside and outside time. How can we conceive of these seemingly contradictory relationships? Should we think that there was a time before time, or a time beyond time? This is a journey to the limits of existence, and even to the limits of what we can think.