Guest talk: Time and Time Design - Toward a Temporal Turn by Prof. Dr Dr Norman Sieroka

About the talk
Human activity shapes our environment on different time scales. Recently, this influence has intensified and extended especially to very short and very long time scales. Through digitalisation, we have an influence on ever shorter time scales, and on ever larger time scales we are confronted with problems such as climate change and the storage of radioactive waste.

From understanding the impact of time on cities, health and as a factor that directly influences resilience, it is therefore important to establish time and time design as distinct and independent research topics.

In this talk, I will briefly place the above challenges in a philosophical context. I will show how the underlying questions about time are ultimately questions about the ordering and repetition of events. I will then explain my research, and how certain aspects of "timing" in music might serve as toy models to approach fundamental questions about time and well-being.

This will be a 20-minute talk, followed by a 15-20-minute Q&A.

About the speaker
Norman Sieroka, born near Worpswede in 1974, has been external page Full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Bremen since 2019. He is also a Fellow at the external page Einstein Center Chronoi in Berlin and a Lecturer in philosophy at ETH Zürich.

Norman Sieroka studied philosophy, physics and mathematics at the Universities of Heidelberg and Cambridge. At Cambridge he received the degree of M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science in 1999, at Heidelberg the diploma in Physics in 2002. In 2004, he received his doctorate at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Heidelberg University with a thesis on "Neurophysiological Aspects of Time Perception". This was followed by simultaneous teaching and research activities in philosophy, physics and neurophysiology in Heidelberg, Bamberg and Zurich, as well as a doctorate degree ("Umgebungen", 2009) and a "Habilitation" ("[Un-]Conscious Perception and Time", 2012) in philosophy at the ETH Zurich.

Norman Sieroka was, among other things, Visiting Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the external page University of Notre Dame (USA), Visiting Scholar at the Singapore-​ETH Centre, Associate Member of the Zurich Center "History of Knowledge" and Managing Director as well as Board Member of the Turing Centre Zürich. He is currently a member of the Governance Board of the Think-​and-Do Tank "rethink" at ETH Zurich, a Participating Researcher in the external page DFG Research Training Group "Contradiction Studies" and a member of the coordination team of the Bremen external page "Humans on Mars" Initiative. He is also a member of the external page Data Science Center and the external page Research Platform "Worlds of Contradiction" (both at the University of Bremen) and a member of the research data working group (external page AG Forschungsdaten) of the U Bremen Research Alliance.

Further information available at external page www.uni-​bremen.de/theophil/sieroka (personal page) and external page www.uni-​bremen.de/theophil (homepage research group).