At the beginning of Newton’s Principia there is a famous scholium where he discusses time, space, place, and motion using three distinctions: absolute and relative; true and apparent; mathematical and common. This chapter discusses these distinctions for the case of time. It is argued that all three distinctions are important for the project of the Principia, and that all three become subject to empirical investigation through their relationship to the empirical project of the Principia. The chapter then argues for the significance of this for philosophy of time, claiming that Newton’s methodology renders empirically tractable certain questions concerning the nature and structure of time, and that this represents an important contribution to philosophy of time. Hence the phrase “empiricist metaphysics.”
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