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E-book Time and Soul : From Aristotle to St. Augustine

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Penilaian

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What is time?Afirst,intuitiveanswer maybethat time isadimension of thephysical universe. As such, it existsand has always existed independentlyofhuman experience.Wethus find it natural to assigntemporal identitiestoeventsthat took place millions ofyearsbefore humanity even came into being,inpar-ticular in areas such as astrophysics,geology, and palaeontology. Weknow,orwe think we know,that the universe came into existencewith the BigBangsome 15 billionyearsago, and with it space and time as we know it.Why timehas existed in the particularway it has–notablyasunidirectional–is stillhardto understand,but the fact seems indisputable and is taken for grantedin manyfacets of our daily lives. Time in this sense allows us to identify individ-ual, non-repeatablemoments in the past as well as the future, thus permittinguniversallyvalid statements to be made about thetemporal sequence or the co-incidence of events that take place in various parts of the world. Time thus un-derstood establishesrelationships between anytwo events that have ever takenplace in the history of the world. In fact,wecan saythat it establishes such athing as a‘history of the universe’in the first place.While manyofthe ideas we todayconnect with physical time would haveseemed strangetopeople in antiquity,the notion that time was an aspect ofthe physical world was widelyshared. As such, it seemed most obviouslycon-nected with theregularities seen in astronomical observations:the dailyand an-nual cycle of the sun; the waxing and waning of the moon;the movementsofplanets and of the fixed stars. Inevitably, these observations tended to suggestthat time is cyclical, and involves the periodic return and recurrenceofthesame or similar events albeitwith some variety at the level of individualbeing.Yet while ancientconceptions of physical time are thus far differentfrom the linear models preferred in our owntime, bothshare the underlying no-tion of time asafeature of the cosmos which we mayobserveormeasure,butwhich exists independentlyofhuman perception let alone of human measure-ment.It is arguable, however,thatthe notion of time as an objective aspect of thephysical world is incompleteand possiblymisleading.After all, it is difficult tothink of or describe the reality of time inaway that does not include someonewho is alreadyaware of it.Time is not visible ormaterial in the waythe earth orthe sun or evenasingle stone or an antelope is. Rather,itappears,time is insep-arable from the mind that has consciousness of time.To us, at least,time seems ineluctablypart of how we think and speak about the world, one wayinwhichwe order the thingsweexperience as not onlyspatiallyarranged but also as oc-curring inatemporal sequence. Time, then,alsohas an experiential dimension.This aspect of time is often called subjective,but the use of this term is not with-out its problems.The point is not that,aswesometimessay,aparticularhour tous seemedto‘last forever’or thatour holidays wereover‘in no time at all’.Rather,time in its physicalreality,counted in seconds,minutes,hours, days,andyears is tiedto our own experience of reality as temporalleadingtoour con-sequent conceptualisation of the world in temporal terms.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

186 ZAC t

Penerbit

Berlin : De Gruyter Saur., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

109 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783110692754

Klasifikasi

186

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Skeptic and Neoplatonic Philosophy

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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