Time before Time: How to Avoid the Antinomy of the Beginning and Eternity of the World

Although modern physical cosmology has been able to
emancipate itself considerably from its philosophical
predecessors, it is still occupied with some of their
fundamental questions (cf. Kanitscheider 2002). One of
them is the problem of the finiteness versus infiniteness of
time and space. The philosophical implications of current
scientific approaches to these problems and the Big Bang,
should they turn out to be true, are far-reaching; and they
are based on many (partly speculative) premises as well
as concepts, which are not always sufficiently clear in
scientific practice. Therefore these approaches are also an
interesting subject of reflections for philosophers of
science (cf. Bartels 1996).