Rory Fox challenges the traditional understanding that Thomas Aquinas believed that God exists totally outside of time. His study investigates the work of several mid-thirteenth-century writers, and thus provides access to a wealth of material on medieval concepts of time and eternity.

This book offers a new approach to the representation of meaning of temporally-located utterances and discourses. Temporality, the author suggests, should be taken to mean degrees of certainty, understood in turn as degrees of acceptability concerning the eventuality referred to in the speaker's utterance.

The debate on personal persistence has been characterized by a dichotomy which is due to its still Cartesian framwork: On the one side we find proponents of psychological continuity who connect, in Locke’s tradition, the persistence of the person with the constancy of the first-person perspective in retrospection. On the other side, proponents of a biological approach take diachronic identity to consist in the continuity of the organism as the carrier of personal existence from a third-person-perspective. Thus, what accounts for (...) someone’s persistence over time, is the continuity of his mind on the one hand, and the continuity of his body on the other. In contrast to those views, the paper intends to show that bodily existence represents the basis of selfhood across time, both as the continuity of the experiential self and as the continuity of the autopoietic organism. On the one hand, the lived body conveys a continuity of the self from a first-person perspective, namely a pre-reflective feeling of sameness or a felt constancy of subjectivity. Moreover, an analysis of awakening and sleep shows that there is a continuous transition from full wakefulness to periods of deep sleep which may thus not be regarded as a complete interruption of subjective experience. On the other hand, this constancy converges with the continuity of the organismic life process as conceived from a third-person perspective. Thus, the experiential self of bodily subjectivity and the autopoietic self of the living organism should be regarded as two aspects of one and the same life process. Finally, the lived body also exhibits a specific form of memory that results from the continual embodiment of existence: it consists of all the affinities, capacities and experiences, which a person has acquired throughout his life. Thus, it provides a continuity of self that must not be actively produced through remembering, but rather integrates the person’s entire past in his present being and potentiality. (shrink)

The main goal of Michael Tooley’s groundbreaking book is to establish a position intermediate between the tenseless theory of time and the standard tensed theory of time. Tooley argues for a novel version of the tensed theory of time, namely, that the future is unreal and the present and past real, and yet that reality consists only of tenseless facts. The question that naturally arises for the reader concerns an apparent paradox: how could the tensed theory of (...) time be true if reality consists only of tenseless facts? (shrink)

The primary goal of Peter Ludlow's Semantics, Tense, and Time is to illustrate how one can study metaphysical issues from a linguistic/semantic perspective by addressing the debate between tenseless theorists and tensed theorists. Ludlow's book is noteworthy in part because of the novelty of its approach to this debate and in part because it addresses and endeavors to solve the metaphysical problems of temporal solipsism that other temporal solipsists have not addressed.

A review of Huw Price's Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point.

Sir Austin Bradford Hill’s ‘aspects of causation’ represent some of the most influential thoughts on the subject of proximate causation in health and disease. Hill compiled a list of features that, when present and known, indicate an increasing likelihood that exposure to a factor causes—or contributes to the causation of—a disease. The items of Hill’s list were not labelled ‘criteria’, as this would have inferred every item being necessary for causation. Hence, criteria that are necessary for causation in health, disease (...) and intervention processes, whether known, knowable, or not, remain undetermined and deserve exploration. To move beyond this position, this paper aims to explore factors that are necessary in the constitution of causative relationships between health, disease processes, and intervention. To this end, disease is viewed as a causative pathway through the often overlapping stages of aetiology, pathology and patho-physiology. Intervention is viewed as a second, independent causative pathway, capable of causing changes in health for benefit or harm. For the natural course of a disease pathway to change, we argue that intervention must not only occupy the same time and space, but must also share a common form; the point at which the two pathways converge and interact. This improved conceptualisation may be used to facilitate the interpretation of clinical observations and inform future research, particularly enabling predictions of the mechanistic relationship between health, disease and intervention. (shrink)

What is time? Neither the numbering of the motion of things nor their schema, but their way of being. In language, time shows itself as tense. But every verb has both tense and aspect. So what is aspect? Irreducible to tense, it is the way in which anything is at any time whatsoever. Thus the way things are, their being, is not merely temporal – for it is just as aspectual.

This paper suggests that time could have a much richer mathematical structure than that of the real numbers. Clark & Read (1984) argue that a hypertask (uncountably many tasks done in a finite length of time) cannot be performed. Assuming that time takes values in the real numbers, we give a trivial proof of this. If we instead take the surreal numbers as a model of time, then not only are hypertasks possible but so is an (...) ultratask (a sequence which includes one task done for each ordinal number—thus a proper class of them). We argue that the surreal numbers are in some respects a better model of the temporal continuum than the real numbers as defined in mainstream mathematics, and that surreal time and hypertasks are mathematically possible. (shrink)

THE DOMINATING CONCEPT IN GREEK THOUGHT, SAYS TORRANCE, WAS A RECEPTACLE NOTION OF SPACE. THIS HAD NO PLACE IN THE NICENE THEOLOGY. WITH THE ASCENDANCY OF ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY THE RECEPTACLE NOTION OF SPACE DOMINATED MEDIEVAL THEOLOGY, AND THIS IS WHAT, DESPITE LUTHER’S INSIGHT INTO THE RELATION BETWEEN THE ONTOLOGICAL AND DYNAMIC WAYS OF THINKING OF THE REAL PRESENCE AND THE INCARNATION, PRODUCED THE SEPARATION BETWEEN THEM. THIS PROBLEM INHERITED BY MODERN THEOLOGY CAN ONLY BE SOLVED IF WE USE THE PATRISTIC (...) UNDERSTANDING OF JESUS CHRIST IN SPACE AND TIME AS GOD’S PLACE IN THIS WORLD WHERE HE IS PRESENT IN OUR PLACE. (BP). (shrink)

One of the questions that is addressed, from various perspectives, is the origin of time-asymmetry. Given the time-symmetry of the dynamical laws, all inferences about the future that are derivable from a dynamical theory are matched by inferences about the past. For Huw Price, who discusses the origins of cosmological time asymmetry, this is reason to treat all time-asymmetric cosmological theories with caution. He dismisses both the inflationary model and Stephen Hawking’s proposal to account for (...) class='Hi'>time-asymmetry with his famous “no boundary condition.” Instead, on the basis of the fact that we have no a priori reasons to distinguish between initial and final conditions, he advocates Gold’s time-symmetric model for the universe, in which the thermodynamical arrow of time is tied to the expansion of the universe, so that in the contracting phase towards the big crunch, entropy decreases. (shrink)

In 1949, Kurt Gödel found a solution to the field equations of general relativity that described a spacetime with some unusual properties. This “Gödel universe” permitted “closed timelike curves,” hence a kind of time travel, and it did not admit of decomposition into successive moments of time. In the same year, he published “A Remark about the Relationship between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy”, in which he used certain properties of this solution to argue for a kind of (...) temporal idealism, whereby “change [is] an illusion or an appearance due to our special mode of perception”. The paper is short and to the point, but the argument has usually been regarded as fatally flawed. In his Gödel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Gödel Universe, Palle Yourgrau makes a case for Gödel. (shrink)

The focus of this work is the analysis of changes in completed family size and possible determinants of that size over time, in an attempt to characterize the evolution of reproductive patterns during the demographic transition. With this purpose in mind, time trends are studied in relation to the mean number of live births per family (as an indirect measure of fertility), using family reconstitution techniques to trace the reproductive history of each married woman. The population surveyed is (...) a Spanish rural community called Lanciego, located at the southern end of the province of Alava (Basque Country). A total of 24,510 parish records of baptisms, marriages and burials made between 1800 and 1969 were examined to obtain the demographic data set. For each reconstituted family, the variables included in the study were the number of live births per family or family size (FAMS), year of marriage (YEAR), age at marriage of both partners (AMAN, AWOM), wife’s age at the end of marriage (WEND), duration of marriage (MARD), age at first maternity (A1CH), length of reproductive span (REPS) and number of children dying before their first anniversary (MINF). Through a principal component analysis, three factors were found that explained more than 75% of the total variance. Association of variables in factors I and III was particularly useful in characterizing the variability of mean family size in pre-transitional, transitional and post-transitional cohorts. During demographic transition, a decreasing trend is observed in the variables FAMS, REPS and MINF, while variables AWOM, AMAN, WEND and A1CH show a tendency to increase over the 20th century. Results obtained by multiple regression analysis confirm that the best predictors of family size (dependent variable) were REPS and MINF, which between them explained over 85% of the total variation in FAMS (R2=0·853). In Lanciego, birth control seems to be present on the evidence of an increase in age at first maternity and a decrease in age at last parturition, indicating that the beginning of the reproductive span is delayed and its end is brought forward. Interaction between family size and infant mortality is discussed in the light of various hypotheses, including replacement of descendants, the so-called biological effect and the theory of r and k selection. (shrink)

The purpose of the following discussion is to examine the account of time’s nature and time’s ways that was worked out by Plotinus. For the most part, his philosophy of time is given in treatise iii.7 of the Enneads, entitled “Time and Eternity.” His account of time will be related to the major emphases of his metaphysics and to important views on temporality that were developed by some of his predecessors.

Our ability to attend selectively to our surroundings - noticing things that matter, ignoring those that don't - is crucial if we are to negotiate the world around us. This is the first book in years to explore just how our attention can be influenced by time, and how our own perception of time can be influenced by what we attend to.

Discovery of temporal association patterns, temporal association rules from temporal databases is extensively studied by academic research community and applied in various industrial applications. Temporal association pattern discovery is extended to similarity based temporal association pattern discovery from time-stamped transaction datasets by researchers Yoo and Sashi Sekhar. They introduced methods for pruning through distance bounds, and have also introduced SEQUENTIAL and SPAMINE algorithms for pattern mining that are based on snapshot data scan and lattice data scan strategies respectively. Our (...) previous research introduced algorithms G-SPAMINE, MASTER, Z-SPAMINE for time profiled association pattern discovery. These algorithms applied distance measures SRIHASS, ASTRA, and KRISHNA SUDARSANA for similarity computations. SEQUENTIAL, SPAMINE, G-SPAMINE, MASTER, Z-SPAMINE approaches are all based on snapshot and lattice database scan strategies and prunes temporal itemsets by making use of lower bound, upper bound support time sequences and upper-lower distance bound, lower bound distance values. The major limitation of all these algorithms is their inevitability to eliminate dataset scanning process for knowing true supports of itemsets and essential need to have dataset available in memory. To eliminate the requirement of retaining dataset in main memory, algorithms VRKSHA and GANDIVA are two pioneering research contributions that introduced tree structure for time profiled temporal association mining. VRKSHA is based on snapshot tree scan technique while GANDIVA is a lattice tree scan based approach. VRKSHA and GANDIVA both apply Euclidean distance function, but they do not estimate support and distance bounds. This research introduces the pioneering work ULTIMATE that uses a novel tree structure. The tree is generated using similarity measure ASTRA. ULTIMATE uses support bound and distance bound computations for pruning temporal patterns. Experiment results showed that ULTIMATE outperforms SEQUENTIAL, SPAMINE, G-SPAMINE, MASTER, VRKSHA, GANDIVA algorithms. (shrink)

Leibniz’s metaphysics is centered on the claim that ultimate reality is composed of mind-like, immaterial substances, monads. While it is universally agreed that such substances are non-spatial, monads’ relation to time is less clear. In some passages, Leibniz suggests that monads are themselves temporal, yet in others he implies that they have only derived temporal properties in virtue of being connected to phenomenal bodies. This has led to predictable disagreements among commentators, some insisting that monads are intrinsically temporal and (...) some insisting that they are intrinsically non-temporal. In this article, I seek to defend the latter interpretation. To do this, I focus on Leibniz’s account of monadic perception and appetition, arguing that the order of monadic states is given by the intentional content represented therein. This view, I suggest, commits Leibniz to the conclusion that monads are intrinsically non-temporal, having only second-order, derivative temporal properties. (shrink)

This essay examines the link between time and history through the use of cyclic and linear concepts of time. While the former occurs in a cosmological context, the latter is found in familiar historical forms. The author argues for the existence of historical consciousness in early India, on the evidence of early texts.

This paper extends the work of a previous paper on the flow of time, to consider the origin of the arrow of time. It proposes that a ‘past condition’ cascades down from cosmological to micro scales, being realized in many microstructures and setting the arrow of time at the quantum level by top-down causation. This physics arrow of time then propagates up, through underlying emergence of higher level structures, to geology, astronomy, engineering, and biology. The appropriate (...) spacetime picture to view all this is an Evolving Block Universe ‘EBU’, that recognizes the way the present is different from both the past and the future. This essential difference is the ultimate reason the arrow of time has to be the way it is. (shrink)

While linear time results from the measurement of physical events, the temporality of life is characterized by cyclical processes, which also manifest themselves in subjective bodily experience. This applies for the periodicity of heartbeat, respiration, sleep-wake cycle, or circadian hormone secretion, among others. The central integration of rhythmic bodily signals in the brain forms the biological foundation of the phenomenal sense of temporal continuity. Cyclical repetitions are also found in the recurring phases of need, drive, and satisfaction. Finally, the (...) cyclical structure of bodily time manifests itself at an extended level in the form of implicit or body memory. However, this cyclical structure of lived time comes into tension with the orders of linear time which have been increasingly established in Western societies since the modern age. This tension creates both individual as well as societal conflicts and may also result in psychopathological phenomena. As an example, depression and burn-out syndromes will be discussed. (shrink)

The title alone of McCall’s book reveals its ambitious enterprise. The book’s structure is a long inference to the best explanation: chapters present problems that are solved by a single, ontological model. Problems as diverse as time flow, quantum measurement, counterfactual semantics, and free will are discussed. McCall’s style of writing is lucid and pointed—in general, very pleasant to read.

What is it to remember an episode from one’s past? How does episodic memory give us knowledge of the personal past? What explains the emergence of the apparently uniquely human ability to relive the past? Drawing on current research on mental time travel, this book proposes an integrated set of answers to these questions, arguing that remembering is a matter of simulating past episodes, that we can identify metacognitive mechanisms enabling episodic simulation to meet standards of reliability sufficient for (...) knowledge, and that the subjective experience of reliving the past is a precondition for the reliability of simulational remembering. The resulting account of memory, memory knowledge, and their evolution will be of interest both to philosophers interested in empirically-informed approaches to memory and to psychologists interested in the philosophical implications of empirical memory research. (shrink)

Real Time II extends and evolves D.H. Mellor's classic exploration of the philosophy of time, Real Time . This wholly new book answers such basic metaphysical questions about time as: how do past, present and future differ, how are time and space related, what is change, is time travel possible? His Real Time dominated the philosophy of time for fifteen years. This book will do the same for the next twenty years.

Time travel is metaphysically possible. Nikk Effingham contends that arguments for the impossibility of time travel are not sound. Focusing mainly on the Grandfather Paradox, Effingham explores the ramifications of taking this view, discusses issues in probability and decision theory, and considers the potential dangers of travelling in time.

Being and Time’s emphasis on practical activities has attracted much attention as an approach to meaning not modelled exclusively on language. However, understanding this emphasis is made more difficult by Heidegger’s notion of Rede, which he routinely characterizes as both language-like and basic to all disclosure. This paper assesses whether this notion can be both interpreted coherently and reconciled with Heidegger’s emphasis on intelligent nonlinguistic behaviours. It begins by identifying two functions of Articulacy – the demonstrative and articulatory – (...) and a potential source of incoherence in Heidegger’s analysis. Having reviewed some standard approaches to Heideggerian Articulacy, I show how Heidegger’s discussion of predicative judgements implies that language can be linked with different kinds of content. This allows Heidegger’s analysis to be read coherently, provided Articulacy is understood as having distinct purposive and predicative modes. The final section shows how this reading preserves a close connection between Articulacy and language while accommodating intelligent nonlinguistic behaviours. (shrink)

In this paper I shall consider an objection to divine temporality called “The Prisoner of Time” objection. I shall begin by distinguishing divine timelessness from divine temporality in order to clear up common misunderstandings and caricatures of divine temporality. From there I shall examine the prisoner of time objection and explain why the prisoner of time objection fails to be a problem for the Christian divine temporalist.

Scientific journals ask authors to put their manuscripts, at the submission stage, sometimes in a complex style and a specific pagination format that are time consuming while it is unclear yet that the submitted manuscripts will be accepted. In the case of rejections, authors need to submit to another journal most likely with a different style and formatting that require additional work and time. To save authors’ time, publishers should allow authors to submit their manuscripts in any (...) format and to comply with the style required by the targeted journal only in revised versions, but not at the submission step when the manuscripts are not yet approved for publication. (shrink)

This is a study of the nature of time. In it, redeploying an argument first presented by McTaggart, the author argues that although time itself is real, tense is not. He accounts for the appearance of the reality of tense - our sense of the passage of time, and the fact that our experience occurs in the present - by showing how time is indispensable as a condition of action. Time itself is further analysed, and (...) Dr Mellor gives answers to most of the metaphysical questions it provokes, concerning the relation of time to space, the dissection of time, and its relation to change and causation. (shrink)

Michael Tooley presents a major new philosophical theory of the nature of time, offering a powerful alternative to the traditional "tensed" and recent "tenseless" accounts of time. He argues for a dynamic conception of the universe, in which past, present, and future are not merely subjective features of experience. He claims that the past and the present are real, while the future is not. Tooley's approach accounts for time in terms of causation. He therefore claims that the (...) key to understanding the dynamic nature of the universe is to understand the nature of causation. Time, Tense, and Causation is a landmark treatment of one of the oldest and most perplexing intellectual problems, and will be fascinating reading for anyone interested in the character of time. (shrink)

Paul Helm presents a new, expanded edition of his much praised 1988 book Eternal God, which defends the view that God exists in timeless eternity. Helm argues that divine timelessness is grounded in the idea of God as creator, and that this alone makes possible a proper account of divine omniscience.

Our engagement with time is a ubiquitous feature of our lives. We are aware of time on many scales, from the briefest flicker of change to the way our lives unfold over many years. But to what extent does this encounter reveal the true nature of temporal reality? To the extent that temporal reality is as it seems, how do we come to be aware of it? And to the extent that temporal reality is not as it seems, (...) why does it seem that way? These are the central questions addressed by Simon Prosser in Experiencing Time. He defends the B-theory of time, according to which the apparently dynamic quality of change, the special status of the present, and even the passage of time are all illusions. Prosser goes on to explore solutions to certain puzzles raised by experiences of temporal features such as changes, rates, and durations, and in doing so sheds light on broader issues in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This book is intended as an introduction to the philosophical problems of space and time, suitable for any reader who has an interest in the nature of the universe and who has a secondary-school knowledge of physics and mathematics. In particular, it is hoped that the book may find a use in philosophy departments and physics departments within universities and other tertiary institutions. The attempt is always to introduce the problems from a twentieth-century point of view. It is preferable (...) to introduce the history of the topic if and when that history becomes relevant to the development and solution of the problems, rather than to introduce a problem that was of importance in some previous age and to trace the development of it down the years. (shrink)

Understanding compositional practices is a major goal of musicology and music theory. Compositional practices have been traditionally viewed as disembodied and idiosyncratic. This view makes it hard to integrate musical creativity into our understanding of the general cognitive processes underlying meaning construction. To overcome this unnecessary isolation of musical composition from cognitive science, in this conceptual analysis, we approach compositional processes with the analytic tools of blending theory, material anchoring, and enaction. Our case study is Iannis Xenakis’ use of sieves (...) for distributing rhythmic patterns in Psappha. Though disregarded in previous accounts, the timeline and the gearwheel provide crucial conceptual templates for anchoring Xenakis’ idea of time for this score. This case study of conceptual integration templates for temporal representation seeks to gain insight into musical creativity, embodiment, and blending, especially into how virtual interactions with material structures facilitate the construction of complex meanings. (shrink)

In Chronopathologies, the Australian philosopher Jack Reynolds gives an exciting analysis of the intimate connection between time and politics in three trajectories of contemporary philosophy: analytic philosophy, poststructuralism and phenomenology. These trajectories are incompatible in the sense that internalizing the norms of any one of them 'makes taking the other(s) seriously very difficult' (p. 225). Given this incompatibility, Reynolds convincingly argues that the only way forward is to draw out the differences between these trajectories, in order to address the (...) problems and limitations of each from the perspective of the others. Reynolds's fruitful approach uncovers that each trajectory is threatened by a disease of time or 'chronopathology' (a key term that is never fully defined). Such a chronopathology can be characterized as a pathological condition that is the result of two factors: the reduction of the plurality of time to only one of its dimensions; a biased and one-sided view on ethics and politics. Reynolds convincingly identifies the root of the threat. He develops his diagnosis in three steps. 1. Analytic philosophy over-emphasizes the synchronic dimension of time, without making any room for its diachronic dimension. 2. Poststructuralism acknowledges the necessity of a reciprocal relation between the synchronic and the diachronic dimension of time, but ultimately privileges the latter (i.e., the relation remains asymmetrical). 3. An embodied phenomenology opens up a way to bring the synchronic and diachronic dimension of time in a reciprocal and symmetrical relation that does not privilege the one over the other. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to elaborate the elements of a doctrine of providence in the light of a modern conception of temporality. It consists of four parts. Part I is a detailed analysis of Whitehead’s concept of time and Part II an analysis of Heidegger’s view. In Part III, the two are compared, and important points of agreement are drawn out. Part IV presents the working out of the doctrine of providence in the light of the concept (...) of time that has emerged in the first three parts. The index is restricted to proper names. The author writes. (shrink)

Programs in quantum gravity often claim that time emerges from fundamentally timeless physics. In the semiclassical time program time arises only after approximations are taken. Here we ask what justifies taking these approximations and show that time seems to sneak in when answering this question. This raises the worry that the approach is either unjustified or circular in deriving time from no–time.

Dr. Max Felix Silva, dean of the Graduate School of Philosophy and the senior students’ professor of critical theory, was still engrossed in discursively analyzing the transcripts of the peace negotiations between the government panel and the representatives of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. He was trying to show his students the practical use of the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ doctrine that in order to attain optimum results in a dialogue the participants should only use statements and actuations (...) that are truthful, sincere and appropriate all of the time. “Okay, class. You can be truthful but insincere, or you can be truthful and sincere but in an inappropriate way, or you can be appropriate and sincere but not truthful. The point of Habermas is simple: failing in just one of these triple criteria can already jeopardize the outcome of any consensus building. Ako ba ay nasusundan n’yo pa?”. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to elaborate the elements of a doctrine of providence in the light of a modern conception of temporality. It consists of four parts. Part I is a detailed analysis of Whitehead’s concept of time and Part II an analysis of Heidegger’s view. In Part III, the two are compared, and important points of agreement are drawn out. Part IV presents the working out of the doctrine of providence in the light of the concept (...) of time that has emerged in the first three parts. The index is restricted to proper names. The author writes. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new argument against the compatibility of human free will and divine timelessness when conceiving of eternity in terms of an additional dimension as presented by brian leftow. The paper is organized as follows: After giving a brief sketch of leftow’s model, I argue that assuming libertarianism, free will presupposes presentism, since metaphysical indeterminism is only compatible with a presentist A-theory of physical time. Given this result, I make a case for the incompatibility of (...) presentism and divine eternity modelled as a frame of reference, implying the incompatibility of the latter with human free will. (shrink)

While Hegel argues in the Phenomenology of Spirit’s chapter on “Absolute Knowing” that we must see the necessity of each of spirit’s transitions if phenomenology is to be a science, he argues in its last three paragraphs that such a science must “sacrifice itself ” in order for spirit to express its freedom. Here I trace out the implications of this self-sacrifice for readings of the transitions in the Phenomenology, playing particular attention to the roles that space and time (...) play in absolute spirit’s externalization. (shrink)

It is common to say that we leave infancy when, with the passing of time, very different experiences are produced in us, causing us to mature and, in this way, lead us into adulthood; in other words, we could say that infancy ends when, as time passes, we accumulate and live our different experiences. In this sense, two observations come to mind and make us think about the relations between time, infancy, and experience. Victor Hugo and Picasso (...) offered the following concise phrases: “Infancy begins when time brings experience” ; and “…when I was twelve, I painted like an adult, and I spent my entire lifetime learning how to paint like a child” . This text proposes a reflection on these themes, observing them through the universes of education, philosophy, and psychology, and founded in the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Comenius, Augustine, and others. Beginning with a political-philosophical reflection on the concept of infancy, we move toward philosophy, and from there, toward an etymological discussion that circumscribes the theme of linguistics and ends with politics. We are invited to contemplate: what is this infancy we produce, and what practices of power do we create in our relations with the infantile? For this reflexive journey, we turn to the discussions of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben regarding the concept of experience, which lead us to an idea of experience as a route, a crossing, a path to be followed, i.e something that is not given, that is uncertain. Based on this notion, we can link the ideas of infancy and of experience, and both of these to a perspective of opening and to the yet-to-come, the unfinished. In this reflection, we find in St. Augustine spaces for thinking about time as temporality. Amalgamating this reflection on infancy and time with the notion of experience put forth by Benjamin and Agamben , other views and possibilities are produced regarding the themes presented by education in the context of new educational practices with children. (shrink)

Husserl is known to have oriented many aspects of his extensive analyses of phantasy around a contrast to perception: what phantasy and perception have in common, for example, is their intuitiveness; yet, while in perception something is encountered ‘in the flesh,’ in phantasy this experience is modified by its ‘as if in the flesh’ character. However, both in the majority of Husserl’s reflections on phantasy and in much of the secondary literature on the topic, we find few further details concerning (...) the difference between both modes of intuitiveness: ‘in the flesh’ and ‘as if in the flesh.’ In this paper, I draw on sources from Husserl’s later work in order to get clarification on at least one important point of difference, namely the ways in which individuation and identity, that is, constitutions of individual and identical objects, clearly set apart phantasy from perception. As we will see, this requires an understanding of Husserl’s account of objective time, and of the constitution of individual identical objects with their unique positions in objective time. After an introductory discussion of the meaning and the conditions of individuation in the methodical framework of phenomenology, I will lay out the different levels of the constitution of objective time. In the second part of the paper, I will try to follow and explore one of Husserl’s arguments that contrasts the constitutional performances involved in the constitution of phantasy objects with the individuation of real objects in objective time. The textual basis for this discussion is to be found in Husserl’s last book, Experience and Judgement. In what follows, I will begin with a short discussion of the concepts of individuality, individuation, uniqueness and identity, and also ask why these issues may be of special interest for a phenomenologist who is investigating the phenomenon of phantasy. (shrink)

The article shows that the postulate of a space-time continuum is not a logical necessity, since it is possible to construct a theory, where the ultimate limit for the smallest measurable distance a is finite. This quantum of length is a universal constant, like the light velocity c and Planck's constant h. The generalized theory implies that the total energy content of our Universe Eu = hc/2a and that velocities v > c are possible for material bodies, when their (...) energy is approaching E w That's surprising, but there are no logical inconsistencies. On the contrary, this theory removes a basic contradiction between relativity and quantum mechanics: the EPR paradox. It accounts also for the mysterious "internal degrees of freedom" of elementary particles, by relating them to possible results of space-time measurements, when the quantum of length a is finite. /// O presente artigo visa demonstrar que o postulado de um espaço-tempo contínuo não constitui uma necessidade lógica, pois é possível construir uma teoria em que o derradeiro limite para a mais pequena distância mensurável a é finito. Este quantum de distância é uma constante universal, tal como a velocidade da luz c e a constante de Planck h. A teoria generalizada implica que a energia total contida no nosso Universo Eu = hc/2a e que velocidades v > c são possíveis para corpos materials, sempre que a sua energia se aproxima de Eu Segundo o autor do artigo, isto é algo surpreendente, mas pretende-se contudo demonstrar que não há aqui inconsistências lógicas. Pelo contrário, esta teoria remove uma contradição básica entre relatividade e mecânica quântica: o paradoxo EPR. Mostra-se ainda que a teoria dá também conta desses misteriosos graus internos de liberdade que as partículas elementares demonstram possuir, o que acontece precisamente mediante o estabelecimento de uma relação entre elas e os possíveis resultados de medições do espaço-tempo, sempre que o quantum de distância a é finito. (shrink)

One of the questions that is addressed, from various perspectives, is the origin of time-asymmetry. Given the time-symmetry of the dynamical laws, all inferences about the future that are derivable from a dynamical theory are matched by inferences about the past. For Huw Price, who discusses the origins of cosmological time asymmetry, this is reason to treat all time-asymmetric cosmological theories with caution. He dismisses both the inflationary model and Stephen Hawking’s proposal to account for (...) class='Hi'>time-asymmetry with his famous “no boundary condition.” Instead, on the basis of the fact that we have no a priori reasons to distinguish between initial and final conditions, he advocates Gold’s time-symmetric model for the universe, in which the thermodynamical arrow of time is tied to the expansion of the universe, so that in the contracting phase towards the big crunch, entropy decreases. (shrink)