Of time and lamentation : reflections on transience / Raymond Tallis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tallis, Raymond, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Time--Philosophy.

Time.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (736 pages)

Place of Publication:

Newcastle upon Tyne, England : Agenda Publishing, 2017.

Summary:

Time's mysteries seem to resist comprehension and what remains, once the familiar metaphors are stripped away, can stretch even the most profound philosopher. In Of Time and Lamentation, Raymond Tallis rises to this challenge and explores the nature and meaning of time and how best to understand it. The culmination of some twenty years of thinking, writing and wondering about (and within) time, it is a bold, original, and thought-provoking work. With characteristic fearlessness, Tallis seeks to reclaim time from the jaws of physics. For most of us, time is composed of mornings, afternoons, and evenings and expressed in hurry, hope, longing, waiting, enduring, planning, joyful expectation, and grief. Thinking about it is to meditate on our own mortality. Yet, physics has little or nothing to say about this time, the time as it is lived. The story told by caesium clocks, quantum theory, and Lorentz coordinates, Tallis argues, needs to be supplemented by one of moss on rocks, tears on faces, and the long narratives of our human journey. Our temporal lives deserve a richer attention than is afforded by the equations of mathematical physics.The first part of the book, "Killing Time" is a formidable critique of the spatialized and mathematized account of time arising from physical science. Part 2, "Human Time" examines tensed time, the reality of time as it is lived: what we mean by "now", how we make sense of past and future events, and the idea of eternity.

Contents:

KILLING TIME. Introduction : seeing time. Vision : from implicit to explicit time

Hegemony of vision in explicit time sense

Visibly hidden

Addendum Human and animal vision and temporal depth

Time as "the fourth dimension". From moving shadows to the science of mechanics : the seductive idea of time as space

Against space-like notions of time

Is there an arrow of time?

The myth of time travel : the idea of pure movement in time

Further reflections on time as a dimension

Mathematics and the book of nature

From place to decimal place 1 : geometrization of space

From place to decimal place 2 : geometry becomes number

x, y, z, t : space and time stripped bare

Space : beyond the reach of numbers

Some consequences of mathematical literalism

Mathematics and reality : the world as a system of magnitudes

Addendum 1 : Some sideways glances at Henri Bergson

Addendum : A Note On Intelligibility and Reality

Clocking time

The mysterious verb "to time"

Light and dark ; daytime and night-time : shadow clocks and beyond

The pulse and the pendulum

What do clocks (really) do?

Telling the time : "at"

from clock to o'clock

Orchestrating our lives

Towards deep time

Further reflections

Epilogue Finding lost time : physics and philosophy

HUMAN TIME

In defence of tense

The attack on tense : the physicists

The attack on tense : the philosophers

Tense regained : time and the conscious subject

Living Time : Now

Now

The present

Presence

The past : locating the snows of yesteryear

The presence of the past

Out of sight into mind : getting the past into focus

Where, then, are those snows? Memory and history

A Last Backward Look At Memory and the Past

Coda

Addendum A note on memory

Concerning tomorrow (today)

Introducing the future : all our tomorrows

The contested openness of the future

Final reflections on the future

Beyond time : temporal thoughts on eternity

The idea of eternity

The relationship between time and eternity

Was the word in the beginning?

FINDING TIME

(What) is time?

Defining time : preliminary reflections

Time in itself

The stuff of time

Time and change

Objective and subjective time

Concluding comments

Addendum : A note on the singularity

The onlooker : causation and explicit time

Introduction

Time and causation

The onlooker

Final observation of time, change and causation

Addendum : Mellor on memory and the causal arrow of time

Time and human freedom

Intentionality, causation and tensed time

The human agent

Aspects of freedom.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed June 20, 2017).

ISBN:

9781788210225

1788210220