Time

The Human Experience of Time: The Development of Its Philosophic Meaning by Charles M. Sherover (SPEP Studies in Historical Philosophy; Northwestern University Press) First published in 1975 and still without equal, The Human Experience of Time provides a thorough overview of the concept of time in the Western philosophic tradition. Encompassing a wide range of writings, from the Book of Genesis to the work of twentieth‑century philosophers such as Collingwood and McKeon, all with introductory essays by editor Charles M. Sherover, this anthology offers a synoptic view of the changing philosophic notions of time. The main traditional texts‑from Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Locke, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel‑appear here alongside offerings from Lotze, Bergson, McTaggart, Russell, Reichenbach, Peirce, Dewey, Heidegger, and others. The Human Experience of Time is not only a historical overview but also a dialectical analysis displaying the diverse approaches to the continuing philosophic exploration of time.

Conversations About the End of Time by Stephen Jay Gould, Umberto Eco, Jean-Claude Carrire, Jean Delumeau (Fromm) There is nothing special about the year 2000, yet the start of the third millennium proved a focus for many deep anxieties and expectations. Four of the world's boldest and most celebrated thinkers: Stephen Jay Gould, best-selling Harvard paleontologist; Umberto Eco, Italian novelist and professor of semiotics; Jean Delumeau, French historian; and Jean-Claude Carrire, playwright and critic offer a vast range of insights into how we make sense of time: paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould on dating the Creation, evolutionary "deep time," and the need for ecological ethics on a human scale; Umberto Eco, on the brave new world of cyberspace and its likely impact on memory, cultural continuity, and access to knowledge; screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrire on "the art of slowness" and attitudes toward time in non-Western cultures; and Catholic historian Jean Delumeau on how the Western imagination has always been haunted by ideas of the Apocalypse. Each scholar is given a chapter. The format of question-and-answer is not too distracting and makes for a relatively comprehensible and quick read. Although there are some slightly awkward translations of idiomatic expressions, the insights that these well-rounded scholars provide are attention rousing and revelatory.

The issue of the human meaning of time has vast extensions into theoric evolution as well as the underlying structure of experience. In Synchronicity: Through the Eyes of Science, Myth and the Trickster by Allan Combs, Mark Holland, Robin Robertson (Marlowe & Company) the authors revisit an idea and experience that Carl Jung coined. The term "synchronicity" Jung sought to describe meaningful coincidences that conventional notions of time and causality do not explain. Working with the great quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Jung sought to reveal these coincidences as phenomena that involve mind and matter, science and spirit, thus providing rational explanations for parapsychological events like telepathy, precognition, and intuition. Synchronicity reexamines the work of Jung and Pauli, as well as noted scientists Werner Heisenberg and David Bohm; identifies the phenomena in ancient and modern mythologies, particularly the Greek legend of Hermes the Trickster; and illustrates it with engaging anecdotes from everyday life and literature. Definitely an approachable update of the idea made respectable by Swiss psychologist.

LUNAR VOICES

Of Tragedy, Poetry, Fiction, and Thought

by David Farrell Krell

University of Chicago Press

$14.95, paper; 181 pages, notes, bibliography, index

0-226-45277-8

hardcover:

Time inhabits the literate ruminations of Krell upon nine writers: Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Trakl, Empedocles, Kafka, and Garcia Marquez. Krell uses the phases of the moon as a unifying theme in this approach to a unique poetics, inspired principally by Heidegger. The complex blending of reading and cross readings of these author's who comment upon the same themes provides metamorphic and metaphoric consolidation of basic themes of transition.

Table of Contents:

Preface
1. The Sensuality of Tragedy, the Tragedy of Sensuality
Antiquity and Modernity: The Epochal Suspension of Empedocles
Time, Tragic Downgoing, Affirmation
Sensual Tragedy, Tragic Sensuality
2. Stuff. Thread. Point. Fire: Holderlin's Dissolution
The Reproductive Act
The Bypassed Terminus
At the Burning Point
Digression on Heidegger and Innigkeit
Hyperbollipsis
3. The Source of the Wave: Rhythm in the Languages of Poetry and Thinking
Antiphon
The Animating Wave
Fetters
Saxifrage
Rhythms of Presencing and Absencing
4. The Lunar Voice of the Sister
The Selenic Situation of the Sister
Upon the Being and Breast of a Girl
The Generation of the Unborn
Evil Most Furious. Dissension between Brother and Sister
How to Gain a Sister?
In (the) Place of God
One Geschlecht: (S)he-lovers, Sea-lovers
5. "I, an Animal of the Forest...": Blanchot's Kafka
The Feminine World and Literary Ambiguity
The Animal Kingdom of the Writer
Solitude, Silence, and the Sister
The Narrative Voice
An Incarnation Openly Bearing Its Emptiness
The Burrow
The Moss
6. Lunar Solitudes: The Eternal Return of Gabriel Garcia Marquez Eternal Recurrence? of the Same?
Solitudes of Love and Rancor
The Solitude of Parchment
Index

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Copyright   Last modified: August 24, 2007

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