Philosophy of Time

Abrahamic Religions and Non-Cyclical Time: Some Philosophical Reflections (Spanish)

by Carlos Segovia

"Las religiones del Libro y el problema del tiempo," Isidorianum 30 (2006) 187-204.

Making Communities Resilient To Crisis: Exploring the Tensions & Dilemmas

by Liza Griffin

The Paradox of the Present

by Narve Strand

Opuscula 2, 2000: 39-55

Ecology and the art of the possible

by Marco Cuevas-Hewitt

Forthcoming. Due for publication in mid-2012. Draft available for viewing.

First paragraph: "Evocative images, wispy like memory, light up the walls of a sunless room in an old colonial... more First paragraph: "Evocative images, wispy like memory, light up the walls of a sunless room in an old colonial era mental asylum turned art gallery. In their glow, an odd array of objects: Time-worn furniture, an antique French stereoscope, a bouquet of native flowers, jars of assorted bush tucker. Binding them are the invisible threads of stories, gathered up and re-woven by artists Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe of the Sydney-based collective, Makeshift, during their two sojourns in Esperance in the autumn and spring of 2011. The black and white projection at the focal point of the installation conveys an eighteenth century dining scene, seemingly plucked out of Europe and parachuted into the dry salt lake where it was filmed, save for the bloodroot, wattleseed, and other edible native plants comprising the spread. Adding to its curiousness is the artists’ unusual choice to film it as a tableau vivant or ‘living picture’. This now-quaint convention, once popular as a form of entertainment at the soirees of aristocratic elites, involves the presentation of a scene by a silent and motionless cast of characters as if imitating a painting or photograph. The effect achieved by Makeshift is a film reel resembling a slideshow of images from the colonial frontier, eerily still but for the tablecloth flapping in the breeze..."

Time and Formal Authenticity: Husserl and Heidegger

by Robert Jordan

published as Chapter 2 in The Many Faces of Time, ed.John B. Brough and Lester Embree (Dordrecht; Boston; London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000).

Husserl’s transcendental conception of the relation between time constitution and immanent time was still very far off... more Husserl’s transcendental conception of the relation between time constitution and immanent time was still very far off conceptually when he delivered the 1905 Time Lectures. The conceptual framework of his General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology[1] of 1913 maintains that the status of all mental processes (or lived experiences, Erlebnisse) as occurring in the flux of immanent time is achieved through constitutive functions which cannot be authentically understood as occurring in time at all even though they also are bound to be identified as occurring at the present moment in the constituted flux and the flux as occurring to and through the lived body and the lived body as belonging to the life-world. The flux is, therefore, necessarily intended as belonging to world-time. The flux of mental processes and immanent time itself, therefore, are constituted, and the syntheses through which they get constituted do not occur in the flux or in immanent time. Through such synthetic transcendental occurrences, the self makes itself be in time and in the world. Accordingly, the transcendental subject coincides only partially with the subject in the world, but it does so necessarily and <38> can exist only by doing so, by “making” itself be in the world. If vast differences in nomenclature are overlooked, this later position is close in many ways to[2] the one Martin Heidegger was developing when he was engaged in editing the 1905 lectures for their first publication. For the relation of conditioned to conditioning here is mutual; the subject’s constitutive or transcendental functions are dependent upon the given “contents” whose temporal being they constitute. Moreover, there is in truth only one ego, the one that is in the world and is in it at all only by making itself be in time and in the world.
It is a vast improvement over the position of 1905 when Husserl later conceives immanent time to be entirely continuous and to be so through a complex of syntheses that occur as aspects of a single continuous identifying synthesis that enables it passively to constitute the flux of lived experiences as immanent time with its individual temporality or individual time-form, its being in time. Thus, Husserl came to conceive every mind or self to be constituted with its own unique time-form regardless of whether or not any of the lived experience occurring in the flux of immanent time is both doxic and active, i.e., is of a sort which alone can constitute categorial form. The later conception understands the “pure ego” to be a simple unity which this underlying synthesis achieves in a purely passive way so that there may exist egos whose mental lives include not even the obscurest awareness of logical or categorial form.

Learning to Challenge Time in Adult Education: A Critical and Complex Perspective

by Michel Alhadeff-Jones

Alhadeff-Jones, M. (2010). Learning to Challenge Time in Adult Education: A Critical and Complex Perspective. In B. Merrill (ed.) Proceedings of the 40th Annual Standing Conference on University Teaching and Research in the Education of Adults (SCUTREA).

Considering the political nature of conflicting experiences of time, promoting a complex understanding of time becomes... more Considering the political nature of conflicting experiences of time, promoting a complex understanding of time becomes critical. This paper claims that learning to discriminate, evaluate, interpret, argue, judge, and challenge experienced temporalities and rhythms should be at the core of original forms of critical theory and practice in adult education.

K ontologiji filma. O odnosu s fotografijo in časom

by Matej T. Vatovec

Why So Serious? Presentism and the Problem of Cross-Temporal Relations

by Ross Inman

It is a common assumption in the metaphysics of time that a commitment to presentism entails a commitment to serious... more It is a common assumption in the metaphysics of time that a commitment to presentism entails a commitment to serious presentism, the view that objects can exemplify properties or stand in relations only at times at which they exist. As a result, non-serious presentism is widely thought to be beyond the bounds for the card- carrying presentist in response to the problem of cross-temporal relations. In this paper, I challenge this general consensus by examining one common argument in favor of the thesis that presentism entails serious presentism. The argument, I claim, begs the question against non-serious defenders in failing to account for their wider metaontological views concerning non-committal quantification.

Chapter 12 On Temporal Becoming, Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics

by Tomasz Bigaj

published in D. Dieks (ed.) 'Ontology of Spacetime II', Elsevier 2008, pp. 229-244

In the first section of the chapter, I scrutinize Howard Stein’s 1991 definition
of a transitive becoming... more In the first section of the chapter, I scrutinize Howard Stein’s 1991 definition
of a transitive becoming relation that is Lorentz invariant. I argue first that
Stein’s analysis gives few clues regarding the required characteristics of the
relation complementary to his becoming—i.e. the relation of indefiniteness.
It turns out that this relation cannot satisfy the condition of transitivity, and
this fact can force us to reconsider the transitivity requirement as applied
to the relation of becoming. I argue that the relation of becoming need not
be transitive, as long as it satisfies the weaker condition of “cumulativity”:
for a given observer the area of the events that have become real should
not diminish as time progresses. I show that there are actually two relations
of becoming that meet this weakened condition: Stein’s (transitive) relation
of causal past connectibility and the (non-transitive) relation that is the
logical complement of the future causal connectibility. In the second part
of the chapter I defend Stein’s notion of temporal becoming against the
attack that appeals to quantum-mechanical non-locality. I critically evaluate
the argument given by Mauro Dorato (1996) that purports to show that
space-like separated measurements done on the EPR system have to be
mutually determinate. Finally, in order to account for the truth of counterfactual
statements that link the space-like separated outcomes, I propose a
dynamic conception of becoming, according to which the sphere of determinate
events as of a given point may depend on the physical phenomena
transpiring at this point.

The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness

by Scott Bakker

Draft

According to the latest estimates, the human brain performs some 38 000 trillion operations per second. When you... more According to the latest estimates, the human brain performs some 38 000 trillion operations per second. When you compare this to the amount of information that reaches conscious awareness, the disproportion becomes nothing short of remarkable. What are the consequences of this radical informatic asymmetry? The Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness (BBT) represents an attempt to 'explain away' several of the most perplexing features of consciousness in terms of information loss and depletion. The first-person perspective, it argues, is the expression of the kinds and quantities of information that, for a variety of structural and developmental reasons, cannot be accessed by the 'conscious brain.' Puzzles as profound and persistent as the now, personal identity, conscious unity, and most troubling of all, intentionality, could very well be kinds of illusions foisted on conscious awareness by different versions of the informatic limitation expressed, for instance, in the boundary of your visual field. By explaining away these phenomena, BTT separates the question of consciousness from the question of how consciousness appears, and so drastically narrows the so-called explanatory gap. If true, it solves the hard problem. But at what cost?

Emmanuela Lévinasa i Jacquesa Derridy krytyka Heideggerowskiej koncepcji czasu

by Barbara Brzezicka

Wymiary czasu, Wydawnictwo OBI, Tarnów 2012 (w druku)

world society social differentiation and time

by Oliver Kessler

Benjaminian Reflections: History, Modernity & Poetry

by Rowan Tepper

Theatres of immanence: coming soon flyer

by Laura Cull

David Newheiser, "Time and the Responsibilities of Reading: Revisiting Derrida and Dionysius." Reading the Church Fathers. Eds. Scot Douglass and Morwenna Ludlow. London: T&T Clark, 2011.

by David Newheiser

Algunas observaciones sobre los conceptos de Ser y Tiempo en Uji de Eihei Dōgen

by Alexander Valdenegro

Resumen:
Los conceptos de temporalidad y ser son abordados por el budismo mediante la formulación de dos de sus... more Resumen:
Los conceptos de temporalidad y ser son abordados por el budismo mediante la formulación de dos de sus principales enunciados “todos los agregados carecen de ego ” y “todos los agregados son impermanentes”. En Uji Dōgen analiza la interacción entre anatta (no-yo) y anicca (impermanencia) partiendo para ello desde el uso común de los términos en una exposición didáctica y vívida. Nos propondremos analizar una determinación conceptual de cómo funciona el par ordenado <ser,tiempo>, enumerando las diferentes posturas asumidas por los críticos en la materia y ensayando una posible solución.

Palabras clave: anatta, anicca, budismo zen, tiempo, ser.


Abstract:
The concepts of temporality and being are addressed for Buddhism by developing two of its major statements "all aggregates are not-self" and "all aggregates are impermanent." In Dogen's Uji analyzes the interaction between anatta (not-self) and anicca (impermanence) starting for it from the common use of the terms. We propose to analyze a conceptual determination of how the ordered pair <being,time> works, listing the different positions taken by critics in the field and testing a possible solution.

Key-words: anatta, anicca, being, time, zen buddhism.

News, history and the construction of the present in early modern England

by Daniel Woolf

“A Dialogue among Fragments: History as Constellation in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn”

by Adrian Versteegh

Hotel Critical Review, No. 7 (2008)

“Exploding the Continuum: Time, Recovery, and Redemption in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’”

by Adrian Versteegh

Brio, 7:1 (Spring 2009)

Temps de Dieu, temps des hommes

by Philippe Cousson

Contribution protestante à la 25e rencontre interreligieuse de Poitiers.

Les temps scientifiques, historiques, ethnologiques marquent l'homme. Le temps de Dieu est celui porté par un peuple... more Les temps scientifiques, historiques, ethnologiques marquent l'homme. Le temps de Dieu est celui porté par un peuple vers le Jour du Seigneur, à la fois la venue du Christ déjà accomplie et la fin de notre temps à venir. Le kairos c'est le moment d'agir pour l'homme comme pour Dieu. La résurrection est l'espérance chrétienne.