Abstract
Philosophical tradition often opposes the time of consciousness or the subject, and the time of nature or the world, thus drawing a division between the great philosophers of time - Kant, Augustine or Husserl vs. Aristotle, Newton, Bergson. Where some, such as Ricoeur in Temps et récit, attempt to go beyond this opposition, the present paper will focus on the time of nature, and thus challenge the presupposition, common in this discussion, that there is only one time. In contrast to a certain metaphysics of time that takes physical time as its paradigm and assumes its exclusivity, I will study various scientific practices of representation, modelling and measurement of and within time. The wager made here, following the authors of Temps de la nature et nature du temps(Paris: CNRS, 2018), is that this epistemological approach concerned with the diversity of "times" in sciences ranging from particle physics to developmental biology to evolutionary biology, is relevant to the metaphysical interrogation of time.
More specifically, I will develop two emerging issues that cut across the epistemic practices under consideration: the irreversibility of time, and the diversity of time scales. This last point will lead me to highlight the way in which, in various disciplines, the very possibility of modeling phenomena envelops presuppositions concerning couplings or decouplings between time scales.
