What, Then, Is Time?

Front Cover
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Apr 25, 2001 - Philosophy - 256 pages
'What is time?' Well-known philosopher and intellectual historian, Eva Brann mounts an inquiry into a subject universally agreed to be among the most familiar and the most strange of human experiences. Brann approaches questions of time through the study of ten famous texts by such thinkers as Plato, Augustine, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, showing how they bring to light the perennial issues regarding time. She also offers her independent reflections. Examining the three phases of time, past, present, and future, she argues that neither external time nor the time of the human past is real: the one is a comparison of motions and the other a projection of memory. She concludes that true time is internal and has its origin in the imaginative structure of memory and expectation. Throughout her rich and original study, Brann never fudges the central fact that time is a mystery.
 

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2001)

Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis. This book is part of her trilogy dealing with three central human capacities. The World of Imagination explores our ability to make the absent present. The Ways of Naysaying deals with our ability to deny existence, reality, or being. This component of her trilogy, What, Then, Is Time?, discovers our ability to live with what is no longer, or not yet.

Bibliographic information