Yet More Eternity

I wanted to report on the excellent conference on "Eternity" I attended in Bochum before Christmas. It was very well-organized by James Wilberding and Judith Hecker, and I have to mention that in the morning on the way there on the train, I saw that the electronic destination sign above the platform read, "THIS WAY TO ETERNITY CONFERENCE". Now that's German efficiency.

There were papers from James Wilberding (Bochum), myself, Yitzhak Melamed (Johns Hopkins), Alastair Welchman (Texas San Antonio), and Kris McDaniel (Syracuse and member of the philosophy band the Monads). There were good comments on all the papers by other invited speakers. I was mostly talking about the eternity of the world in the Arabic tradition.

We covered the whole history of philosophy between us, obviously not managing to look in detail at everything but we did get through a lot. It was interesting to see themes emerging across the whole conference, for instance the question of how/whether the temporally bound is produced by the eternal, the difference between timeless eternity and everlastingess (i.e. something's existing within time, but forever).

It will in due course produce a volume entitled "Eternity" in a series called Oxford Philosophical Concepts, published by Oxford UP. Should be a good book!