Time is among the oldest and most far-reaching subject matters of philosophy and philosophers long have sought to specify what time is. By and large, though, philosophers have developed monolithic views, in which time is identified with chronological precedence, say, or with persistence, or change, or the experience of persistence and change. The problem with such monolithic views is that they are limited to mere excerpts of temporal reality, at the expense of others. Monolithic views thus are incomplete.

Ontology and Time is a two-volume work, in which Thorben Petersen attempts to overcome this defect by developing a pluralistic ontology of time and offering a unified foundation for the whole of temporal reality. Distinguishing a variety of different temporal determinations of things, and promoting temporal distance relations as foundational, Petersen explains how all temporal determinations, including persistence, change and the experience thereof are all dependent on relations of temporal distance. The first of these two volumes, A Foundation for Temporal Reality, is focused on the ground level of the temporal world and outlines a variant of substantivalism, on which space-time is explanatory prior to the temporal determinations of things.

For this work, Thorben Petersen has received the De Gruyter Prize for Analytical Philosophy of Mind or Metaphysics/Ontology.