AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH TO AUGUSTINE'S THEORY OF TIME 1 (original) (raw)
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AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH TO AUGUSTINE’S THEORY OF TIME
AN INTERDISCIPLINARY ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACH TO AUGUSTINE’S THEORY OF TIME, 2022
This article attempts to explore Augustine’s discussions on the issue of time from methodology and to propose some potential areas for future research to focus on. To achieve this, I start by illustrating the prominent role of philosophy in arousing interest in the theme through a brief historical introduction to the reception of Book XI of Confessiones. After introducing the dominance of the philosophical approach, this paper turns to the challenge and supplementation of the textual and historical methods, while highlighting how they are still limited by abstract philosophical concepts. In response to the shortcomings of existing research, I suggest that the root of its problem is the philosophical approach that reduces Augustine to static ideas. Then, I advocate an interdisciplinary and holistic approach based on different anthropological views. In the next section, through analysis of the methods and perspectives of Augustine in his discussion of time in De Ordine, my research intends to reveal Augustine’s complicated intellectual background and reconstruct it through interdisciplinary methods. Based on the universality of knowledge in the natural sciences, the theories and methods of modern physics may be a potential tool to examine Augustine’s conclusions and arguments. The recent focus of psychology on temporal cognition could also be helpful in answering Augustine’s doubts. The latest developments in technology, such as deep learning, can then help clarify Augustine’s terminology at the semantic level.
Augustine meets Meno: the many faces of temporality
Metascience, 2018
What, then, is time?'-Augustine famously asked in his Confessions, adding: 'If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know.' This volume, comprising essays by experts in their respective fields, proposes to broach the question at a level above mere 'gut feeling,' concentrating on the 'time of Nature' as opposed to time 'as an essential structure of consciousness or thought.' As the editors stress in their Introduction, the book relies on the idea that 'a comparative approach to these pervasive issues regarding time in the sciences would be the best way to provide a general philosophy of time with a philosophical understanding of what time in nature is for those who strive to understand nature' (9). The subjects are grouped in four parts, devoted, respectively, to the Experience and the Scientific Framing of Time, Time Paradoxes in Physics, Deep Time, and Time of the Evolution. Since it is impossible to do proper justice to all essays in the volume, in what follows I will focus on a few approaches that I consider indicative of both the scope and the philosophical connotations of the book's topics. The merits of interdisciplinarity are explored by David Braddon-Mitchell and Kristie Miller in Chapter 5. Raising the question where to 'locate phenomena such as temporality,' the authors invoke the 'subject-setting role' of special sciences for 'lower-level disciplines': special sciences downwardly constrain lower-level science and lower-level science upwardly determines whether there is anything answering to these constraints. Appealing to the structural similarity with so-called folk theories and the respective 'folk roles,' the authors conclude that time is whatever it is that explains the success of the term 't': the 't-role.' Then, the question is posed, whether there is a unique phenomenon, discoverable by physics, which plays all t-roles. The authors canvass various options: sciences sans subject-setting role; different roles for different sciences, etc.
Religious studies, 1995
In Confessions X, Augustine ponders the question of what time is and admits that he only knows what time is when no one is asking. Wittgenstein suggests that perplexity of this sort is peculiarly philosophical. In this essay I attempt (not for the last time) to explicate Augustine's philosophical problem of time.
New Light on Time in Augustine’s Confessions (Studia Patristica 2018)
Studia Patristica, 2018
In Confessions XI, Augustine tentatively defined ‘time’ (tempus) as a ‘dilation of the soul’ (distentio animi). But what did he mean? From Eugippius in the 6th century to Jean-Luc Marion in the 21st, commentators have sharply disagreed. The present article briefly sketches the reception history of Confessions XI, before restating the argument of a recent monograph on this topic, The Space of Time (Leiden and Boston, 2014). Unlike any previous interpretation of time in the Confessions: the ‘sensualist’ interpretation set out in that book coherently accounts for the time of beasts in Confessions X, the time of humans in Confessions XI, and the timelessness of Augustine’s ‘heaven of heaven’ (caelum caeli) in Confessions XII. It is then asked why Confessions XI has been read in light of Platonic, Peripatetic, Stoic, and Neoplatonic time-concepts – but never the Epicurean. To the precise extent that Augustine’s time-theory is ‘soulish’ (as D. A. Napier has put it), his time-theory is also ‘sensualist’; and there is only one ‘sensualist’ time-theory in antiquity: the Epicurean. It is finally suggested that the influence on Augustine of Lucretius’ Epicurean epic, De Rerum Natura, has gone unnoticed – and sheds new light on time in Confessions XI.
I try to show that Augustine analysis of time is superior to Husserl's, while anticipating Husserl's time analysis. I also brief suggest how Augustine prefigures Heidegger's existential analysis. I also argue that in order to fully appreciate Augustine's analysis we must understand the elimination of temporality in terms of eternity. Without that perspective, temporality is bound to lead to despair, as Augustine shows.
Figuring the Porous Self: Augustine and the Phenomenology of Temporality
Modern Theology, 2013
The first person who sensed profoundly the enormous difficulties inherent in this analysis, and who struggled with it almost to despair, was Augustine. Even today, anyone occupied with the problem of time must still study . . . the Confessions thoroughly. 1 -Edmund Husserl
Augustine and The Paradox of the Present
In the eleventh book of the Confessions we see Augustine—indeed, in a rare feat of protracted analysis—exploring the enigma of time according to a schema of three questions: 1) What is time? 2) How can it be measured? 3) How is it related to eternity? Central to the investigation and eventual solution of this enigma is the concept of 'the present' (praesens). Although I am of the opinion that Augustine’s treatment and proposed solution to the enigma of time offer valuable insights, as well as mark an advance vis-à-vis pre-Augustinian thought, I will argue in this essay that he ultimately gives it an inadequate answer due to operating with a fundamentally paradoxical view of the present—a paradoxicality of which he is insufficiently aware