Marco Portillo: Branching Time as the Metaphysics of Biological Temporality

Tuesday 19 May 2026 @11:30 (CET)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
How should we think about time in biology? Biological processes are irreversible, historically contingent, and open to alternative developmental and evolutionary trajectories. This raises the question of what kind of temporal ontology is required to make sense of time in the biological sciences. Standard linear models of physical time fail to capture these features (Longo & Montévil 2014). In this talk, I examine whether branching time models  (Correia & Iacona 2012; Belnap, Müller & Placek 2022, Spolaore & Zanardo 2025) offer a suitable framework for understanding biological temporality. Rather than treating branching as a merely formal or representational device, I explore how it can reflect genuine modal and causal structures underlying processes such as development, adaptation, and evolution. The goal is to assess whether branching time models can serve as a plausible metaphysical framework for the temporal structure of biological phenomena.

Bio
Marco Portillo is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at UNED and the University of Milan, working on philosophy of time, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. He is a researcher in METIS and the Centre of Philosophy of Time.