Tag: Time

December 23, 2015

A moment is not intrinsically longer or shorter than a century, except in relation to an element of consciousness by which it is possible to establish its direction and measure its duration… Yet human time is the only unit of measure that we can understand.

– Alain Daniélou

December 6, 2013

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…

December 6, 2013

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…

December 6, 2013

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…

December 6, 2013

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…

December 6, 2013

An Ethics of Love – Part 2
The loved Other is external to me. She is what comes before me, in front of my eyes, just like my near future is before me, unveiling before my mere observation. The loved Other is the one who will call for all my hopes and expectations. Hope (espoir in French) is a wait (esperar in Spanish), that is, hope is irremediably a turn to the future…

May 10, 2013

Herodotus, First Orientalist ? – Introduction
History and lie. Fifth century B.C. Herodotus is equally known as the ‘Father of History’ and the ‘Father of Lies’. His chronological and causal accounts of the Persian Wars may have marked the beginning of history as a discipline, but it was ignored by none, from his contemporaries to his most postmodern commentators, that Herodotus also included in his records some factually questionable episodes…