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Of Time and Lamentation

Of Time and Lamentation

Professor Raymond Tallis

(2017)

Abstract

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. For anyone who has puzzled over the nature of becoming, wondered whether time is inseparable from change, whether time is punctuate or continuous, or even whether time, itself, is real, the book will provoke and entertain. Those who seek to find a place at which the scientific and humanistic views of humanity can be reconciled, will celebrate his placing of human consciousness at the heart of time.


"‘You affirm’, wrote Albert Einstein to his best friend Michel Besso, that the transition from ‘lived experience to objectivity… is accompanied by suffering, which – if one interprets as a physicist – is tied to irreversible processes’. The physicist befuddled by the complexity of the question simply replied, ‘I do not know how to help you’. Now Raymond Tallis takes on the challenge, bravely going where few have ventured, investigating the painful nature of time’s passage, one intimately felt yet stubbornly denied by numerous scientists. This is an important philosophical investigation, at the same time personal and scholarly – a bold and original experiment where art and poetry are given as much importance as science, measurements and equations.– Jimena Canales, author of The Physicist and the Philosopher * "There is hardly a thinking person who has not been struck, at some stage in life, by the deep mystery of time. How is it that things come into being and then pass away? What is a moment, and what flows as the moments succeed each other? What is it to exist in time, and is time another dimension, like the three dimensions of space? Can time be recaptured, replayed, or is all time unredeemable? Does time as described by the theory of relativity square with time as experienced by you and me? All these questions and many more besides well up in the minds of thinking people as soon as they begin to reflect on the nature of time, and in this book Raymond Tallis spells them out clearly, systematically and sympathetically, so as to give the fullest examination to date, both of time as part of the fabric of reality, and of time as the condition of self-conscious experience. He does not solve the mystery, but his argument deepens it in a fascinating way. Written with scholarly rigour and lively humour, this study of the greatest source of our metaphysical anxieties will provide hours of pleasure and instruction to all who delve into it."– Professor Sir Roger Scruton

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Cover page i
Title page iii
Copyright iv
Contents v
Acknowledgements ix
Overture 1
Personal (1) 1
Personal (2) 11
Part I Killing time 15
Chapter 1 Introduction: seeing time 17
1.1 Vision: from implicit to explicit time 17
1.2 The hegemony of vision in explicit time sense 19
1.3 The visibly hidden 21
1.4 Conclusion 24
Addendum Human and animal vision and temporal depth 26
Chapter 2 Time as “the fourth dimension” 29
2.1 From moving shadows to the science of mechanics: the seductive idea of time as space 30
2.2 Against space-like notions of time 34
2.3 Is there an arrow of time? 59
2.4 The myth of time travel: the idea of pure movement in time 81
2.5 Further reflections on time as a dimension 95
Chapter 3 Mathematics and the book of nature 99
3.1 From place to decimal place 1: geometrization of space 99
3.2 From place to decimal place 2: geometry becomes number 106
3.3 x, y, z, t: space and time stripped bare 114
3.4 Space: beyond the reach of numbers 120
3.5 Some consequences of mathematical literalism 132
3.6 Mathematics and reality: the world as a system of magnitudes 183
Addendum 1 Some sideways glances at Henri Bergson 206
Addendum 2 A note on intelligibility and reality 208
Chapter 4 Clocking time 215
4.1 The mysterious verb “to time” 215
4.2 Light and dark; daytime and night-time: shadow clocks and beyond 217
4.3 The pulse and the pendulum 222
4.4 What do clocks (really) do? 223
4.5 Telling the time: “at” - from clock to o’clock 231
4.6 Orchestrating our lives 234
4.7 Towards deep time 237
4.8 Further reflections 239
Epilogue Finding lost time: physics and philosophy 243
Part II Human time 249
Chapter 5 In defence of tense 251
5.1 The attack on tense: the physicists 251
5.2 The attack on tense: the philosophers 258
5.3 Tense regained: time and the conscious subject 280
Chapter 6 Living time: now 287
6.1 Now 287
6.2 The present 306
6.3 Presence 330
Chapter 7 The past: locating the snows of yesteryear 337
7.1 The presence of the past 337
7.2 Out of sight into mind: getting the past into focus 341
7.3 Where, then, are those snows? Memory and history 349
7.4 A last backward look at memory and the past 352
7.5 Coda 355
Addendum A note on memory 356
Chapter 8 Concerning tomorrow (today) 359
8.1 Introducing the future: all our tomorrows 359
8.2 The contested openness of the future 372
8.3 Final reflections on the future 403
Chapter 9 Beyond time: temporal thoughts on eternity 407
9.1 The idea of eternity 407
9.2 The relationship between time and eternity 410
9.3 Was the word in the beginning? 420
Part III Finding time 427
Chapter 10 (What) is time? 429
10.1 Defining time: preliminary reflections 429
10.2 Time in itself 432
10.3 The stuff of time 439
Chapter 11 The onlooker: causation and explicit time 501
11.1 Introduction 501
11.2 Time and causation 503
11.3 The onlooker 542
11.4 Final Observations on time, change and causation 552
Addendum Mellor on memory and the causal arrow of time 555
Chapter 12 Time and human freedom 557
12.1 Introduction 557
12.2 Intentionality, causation and tensed time 558
12.3 The human agent 567
12.4 Aspects of freedom 607
Epilogues Personal and philosophical 619
Personal epilogue 619
Philosophical epilogue 623
Notes 627
Overture 627
Chapter 1 629
Chapter 2 631
Chapter 3 642
Chapter 4 658
Epilogue to Part I 661
Chapter 5 661
Chapter 6 665
Chapter 7 668
Chapter 8 669
Chapter 9 673
Chapter 10 674
Chapter 11 683
Chapter 12 690
Epilogues 695
References 697
Index 711