In the late 1980s, the American economist Jeremy Rifkin claimed that “a battle is brewing over the politics of time” (1987: 10) because he felt that the pivotal issue of the twenty-first century would be the question of time and who controlled it. We think that a battle over the politics of time (and the metaphysics of time) is also a major part of what is at stake in the differences between analytic and continental philosophy. Very different philosophies of time, and associated methodological techniques, serve to define representatives of each of these groups and also to guard against their potential interlocutors. To begin to illustrate this, let us offer a patchy history of philosophy of time in the early twentieth century, the period in which the idea of a “divide” between two ways of doing philosophy began to be entrenched.

In the early twentieth century, the philosophical agenda on time was set in particular by the work of McTaggart, Russell, Husserl and Bergson. At the same time, of course, physics was undergoing a revolution in its understanding of space and time, and philosophical accounts of time were forced to engage with this, as well as with the traditional philosophical literature on the subject (the influential work of Carnap and Reichenbach, among the logical positivists, and Heidegger, is in this period). Einstein's 1905 paper on relativity itself begins, implicitly, with a philosophical point.