Phenomenologies of Time – Introduction
Can science study time? Is time an object of scientific inquiry? Can scientific methods and experiments scrutinise time in a way similar to the study of an instance of matter, a movement or an organism? Defining time has been an intellectual mystery in all societies, and one may arguably concede that in the western tradition of scientific thought, the understanding of time has been set more through postulates and metaphysical assumptions than via a procedure of experimental inspection…
Tag: Phenomenologies of Time
Essay Series
According to the phenomenologists, the world and the human being have to be investigated through the specific evaluation of human consciousness. Husserl would soon realise how, unlike in physical science, a study of consciousness must directly address the question of time. Phenomenology, from the start, would be — among other things — a discourse on time. . .
Phenomenologies of Time – Part 1
“These are extremely important matters, perhaps the most important in the whole of phenomenology.” Thus ended one of the many lectures that Edmund Husserl dedicated to time in the course of his teaching career. Compiled in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), these texts reveal the centrality of time, or, in Husserl’s vocabulary, time-consciousness for the larger project of the philosopher…
Phenomenologies of Time – Part 2
The tradition of phenomenology, which may even appear in some textbooks as a coherent ‘pheomenological family’ with each member neatly listed after the other, is particularly fascinating for the simultaneous depth of their common agreements, and the wide extent of their differences…
Phenomenologies of Time – Part 3
Like a Happy Families card game: as Emmanuel Levinas undertakes his own creative interpretation of phenomenology, he too inherits of a keen attention to the central question of time. A student of both Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg in the year 1928, his indebtedness to them is sufficiently proved through the numerous translations and commentarial works that he dedicated to them for nearly two decades afterwards…
Phenomenologies of Time – Conclusion
This exploration of a few accounts of time in the phenomenological tradition, of these ‘phenomenologies of time’, was set against the backdrop of anterior theories of time. It is generally accepted that these older theories of time, through Newton or Kant, are those that were followed in most of the scientific community…