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Book Details
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 |