Marx's rethinking of the combination between absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value during the 1860s is very important in order to reconsider the co-presence of different forms of historical temporality and exploitation. Postmodernism presents a picture of a plurality of historical times in which the old lies beside the modern and the sweatshop beside the high-tech factory. Because it fails to provide an explanation of the relation between these forms, postmodernism produces a false image of an 'ahistorical' present. In (...) this article I want to show how the combination of differentials of surplus-value works and why a representation of a plurality of historical temporalities synchronised by the temporality of socially-necessary labour is the most adequate image to comprehend it. The theoretical task is to show how the mature categorial structure of Capital not only does not need an historicist philosophy of history, but is in fact incompatible with it. (shrink)

The traditional debate over theories of reference of natural kind terms faces a serious dilemma. On the one hand, although direct reference theory, or the causal–historical analysis of reference to natural kinds, is still highly influential in the philosophy of language, there is a notorious “qua” problem: direct reference theory cannot uniquely determine the referents of natural kind terms. On the other hand, the standard descriptivism does not accommodate our externalist intuition. We propose temporal externalist descriptivism, where relevant future (...) theorists determine references by past speakers. This position makes the externalist intuition about reference compatible with descriptivism about natural kind terms by ensuring the possibility of mistakes in the past and present practice. It also provides a defense of the controversial claim of temporal externalism based on a descriptivist analysis of reference. While causal–historical analysis focuses on inheritance through history, a reference has both a past and a future. In this sense, reference to natural kinds is essentially a provisional phenomenon. (shrink)

In addressing the Lucretian symmetry problem, the temporal bias approach claims that death is bad because it deprives us of something about which it is rational to care (e.g., future pleasures), whereas prenatal nonexistence is not bad because it only deprives us of something about which it is rational to remain indifferent (e.g., past pleasures). In a recent contribution to the debate on this approach, Miguel and Santos argue that a late beginning can deprive us of a future pleasure. Their (...) argument is based on the claim that for birth or death to deprive a person of any value in life, the historically closest counterfactual situation that contains the value is such that the person begins to exist earlier or dies later. This is what they call the Historical Condition. However, the Historical Condition is untenable for several reasons. First, this condition substantially weakens the explanatory capacity of the deprivation account because it implies that most ordinary sorts of pleasures are not deprived by death. In addition, the Historical Condition is vulnerable to counterexamples. In particular, what they offer as a standard case of the deprivation of future pleasure due to a late beginning (what they call Seeing The Beatles), or some of its variants, can be used to falsify this condition. Finally, the Historical Condition is theoretically indefensible because it is based on a faulty analysis of deprivation. (shrink)

Hermeneutics in the twentieth century opened the way for thought of history and time in terms of the very emergence of meaning or the “interpretation” of being as such. Referring to Heidegger and his successors, this chapter contends that the themes of historicity and temporality grant philosophical access to truth and universality in experience without the demand for an “objective” view of things‐in‐themselves or of the very conditions of rationality and human agency. It begins with a reflection on Heidegger's radical (...) appropriation of the older hermeneutic tradition. The chapter also argues that the core themes of hermeneutics, historicity and temporality, open the way for rethinking our relation to truth and universality. Finally, the chapter highlights that while hermeneutics discloses the irreducibly historical and temporal nature of our existential situation as finite human beings without the idea of an independent and objectively certain relation to reality. (shrink)

Cognition and Temporality argues that both verbal grammar and figural grammar have their cognitive basis in twelve characteristic forms of judgment, distributed among individuals in human populations throughout history. These twelve logical forms are context-free and language-free foundations in our attentional awareness, and shape all verbal and figural statements. Moreover, these types of historical judgment are psychogenetic inheritances in a population, and each serves a distinct problem-solving function in the human species. Through analysis of verbal and figural statements, the (...) author contends, the researcher can find evidence of these forms of judgment, and in turn analyze how the event to which those statements attend is formally constructed by that judgment. This construction guides how the event is assessed, approached, and engaged in the process of problem-solving. Artists and aestheticians in the early twentieth century--including Wassily Kandinsky, Stephen C. Pepper, and Andrew Paul Ushenko--have all posited an inherited attentional perspective in individuals, manifested in the logical correspondence between their distinctive verbal and figural grammars. Cognition and Temporality elaborates these claims, arguing that while the styles of well-known artists and writers are conditioned by the public styles of a particular time period, variations in personal style manifest one's inherited form of judgment, and the characteristic grammars that express that form. Through rigorous visual and stylistic analysis, the author demonstrates the expression of these forms among notable writers and artists across history. The result is a wide-ranging and provocative contribution to phenomenology, aesthetic philosophy, and cultural history. (shrink)

This edited collection is the first volume solely dedicated to research on Johann Gottfried Herder's understanding of history, time, and temporalities. Forms of Temporality and Historical Time in the Work of Johann Gottfried Herder is ideal for scholars, graduates, and postgraduates interested in Herder's metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of history, as well as any scholar concerned with 18th-century concepts of time and the emergence of the modern world at the beginning of the 19th century.

Michael Jackson demonstrates the significance of a phenomenology of time through a multifaceted consideration of the gap between our cultural representations of temporality and our experience. Jackson juxtaposes philosophy, history, and ethnography in an attempt to do justice to the bewildering multiplicity of temporal experience.

Building on Bernard Williams’ thesis about the intertwining of history and political philosophy, the essay explores how the problem of the history of dēmokratia after the late-eighteenth and over the nineteenth-century in Britain constituted a primary and critical field in which the philosophical meaning of democracy was debated. Configuring a new temporal perspective grounded in the relationship between ancient and modern democracy, historiographical works by John Gillies, William Mitford, and George Grote put forth an understanding of the concept as a (...) battlefield, involving several conflicting meanings, narratives and historical forces. This historiographical tradition highlighted the tensions underpinning the definition of democracy in the long-term temporal frame linking antiquity and modernity. So even more than contemporary philosophical and political writings, historical understanding constituted a unique concept of democracy that both concentrated and dispersed meaning; it was not just one vision of democracy, among others, but one that acquired the paradoxical power to forge some semantic stability and coherence over time, and to accentuate the threat of the concept’s break up into distinct political premises and historical moments that constituted it. (shrink)

This article explores Gadamer’s description of time(s) and situates it within his aesthetic account and hermeneutics. Bringing together all of Gadamer’s major discussions on time, I develop a consistent account which I then challenge. Whereas Heidegger famously describes transcendental temporality with an emphasis on futurity, Gadamer accentuates a historical temporal awareness and itsdiscontinuous nature. Gadamer’s notion of time is best understood, paradoxically, as a timeless temporality, when time is defined as the sequential movement along discrete points. I argue that (...) Gadamer’s unique description of temporality, which has been largely ignored by scholars, is essential to his understanding of experience and, therefore, to our understanding of his philosophical hermeneutics. (shrink)

Summary Music has been primarily conceived as a temporal art. However, over the last two centuries or so, researchers across different disciplines including musicology, psychology, and philosophy, have been intrigued by the spatial nature of music and sounds, using spatial concepts to define music. This paper aims to demonstrate that an understanding of music perception from a temporal perspective inherently implies a certain spatial dimension. To do this, first, I briefly examine some key arguments that lead to conceiving sound perception (...) in temporal terms. At the same time, I highlight some of the limitations of a purely temporal account of sound perception which necessitate the incorporation of spatial considerations into the conceptualization of sound perception. Consequently, I move on to consider prominent spatial accounts of musical sounds that have been elaborated by psychologists, musicologists, and music composers. In conclusion, I discuss some of the challenges arising from the analogy between music and space, whether conceived in perceptual or cognitive terms. (shrink)

This essay argues that we need practices for tending to what has been discarded as "historical debris" in order to generate queer socialities and meanings that refuse the dominant heteronormative, capitalist, and white supremacist privileging of futurity, novelty, and productivity. Artist and city planner Theaster Gates's transformative work takes root in Chicago's South Side, where he has renovated abandoned buildings into dynamic community spaces for celebrating and generating Black history, art, and culture. The essay reads Gates's artistic-activist practice through (...) Elizabeth Freeman's queer feminist framework, in particular her notion of "temporal drag," to challenge conventional assumptions that whatever is "newest" offers the most radical or queer potential. Freeman's and Gates's work demonstrates the latent possibilities within history's "throwaway" objects and spaces, which can act as sites for imagining and living otherwise, generating queer utopias in our present. (shrink)

The diaries that detail Ernst Jünger’s time in occupied Paris can be as frustrating as they are captivating. Their tone is often both elegiac and detached, at once keenly aware of and distant from the suffering occurring all around their author. This ambiguity becomes particularly apparent in the contrast between the remarkable everyday encounters the diaries describe and their broader cosmic and world-historical ruminations. In this paper, I want to suggest that this tension can be read as a response (...) to the imperatives through which totalising thought shapes how subjects operating under its confines relate to time itself. This dynamic, which can already be found in Jünger’s own earlier work, is dramatized in the way that the diaries construct the alternative temporal perspective of the witness. The witness here is one who survives outside of, and yet also remains caught between, two temporal imaginaries characteristic of modernity: Totalising historicization – the sweeping narrative of progress that demands the sacrifice of the present individual and individual present – and mechanised temporality, that is, instrumentalised clock time. (shrink)

Proposing to examine syntheses of manifold experiences of the contemporary philosophical panorama, Michel Foucault’s “critical ontology of actuality” culminates in the elaboration of an epistemology of the human sciences starting from their irreversible modern twist. Among the various possible ways of characterizing this epistemology—equipped with its own modus operandi: the archaeological-genealogical method—is to see it as the result of a reflection on the topic of temporality. In particular, it is a reflection on historical temporality as «knowledge of time», that (...) is organized into two different yet complementary modalities, two historical heterochronies that can be defined as evenemential time and epistemic time. The first, acephalous and atelic, proves discontinuous, traced back to pure becoming. The second corresponds to the necessary disciplining of this original shapeless material by means of the solidification of structures that each time produce an equilibrium among the instances of knowledge and power. Yet these structures, too, remain subjected to that historic-temporal change to which they have attributed an order. Such an interpretation of time implies a metamorphosis of the notion of subject that, within an overall anti-humanistic perspective, goes from its death as the cogito to its rebirth in the form of an ethical-aesthetic subject: no longer the atemporal guarantor of the order of the real, but rather something committed to a risky exercise of its own freedom as care of the Self. (shrink)

Historically one of the recurring problems which philosophers have faced when trying to come to some understanding of causation is the temporal relationship of the cause to the effect. Philosophers have as yet not achieved any consensus on this issue. Indeed one is able to appeal to the literature on this subject and fine some support for every position which is logically possible. The goal of this paper is to reduce the number of positions concerning the temporal relationship of cause (...) to effect which can be considered adequate to account for the way that causal relationships occur in the world, and the ordinary understanding we have of them. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Why Being and Time? The Temporality of Human Existence But Why Call It “Time?” Residual Issues: Authenticity and Historicality Temporality and Ontology.

In the 1958 lecture, “Hegel and the Greeks,” how does Heidegger intimate a complex sense of historical temporalization when he suggests that the ‘whole of philosophy in its history’ is contained in the title: “Hegel and the Greeks?” Our hypothesis may appear contrarian to contemporary assumptions: a complex notion of origin as paradoxically ‘futural’— particularly in its metaphysical breadth in say the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic—is also at work in Heidegger’s thought. This is particularly acute (...) when Heidegger examines the origin of philosophy in ancient Greek thought as a space that opens a future horizon of Being to dawn—that is, some calling that comes from the unforeseeable future to transcend what Heidegger sees as the end, finality, and ‘collapse’ ofphilosophy after Hegel. (shrink)

Reflections on the relationship of aesthetics to politics tend to circle, almost compulsively, around a relatively stable set of conceptual oppositions, inherited from German philosophies of the late 18th century. This essay proposes an expansion of the theoretical terms of the debate by extending the field of transcendental aesthetics into the domain of historical temporalization. Fundamental art-historical categories may thereby be incorporated, philosophically transformed, into ‘aesthetics’ as forms of historical temporalization: avant-garde, modern, contemporary. The essay expounds two (...) theses, in particular: 1. The historical subsumption of the temporality of the avant-garde by the temporality of the modern: the modern stands to the avant-garde as the negation of its politics by the repetition of the new –‘the new as the ever–same’; 2. the historical subsumption of the temporality of the modern by ‘the contemporary’: the contemporary stands to the modern as the negation of the dialectical logic – and hence specifically developmentalist futurity – of the new by a spatially determined, but imaginary co-presencing. One effect of this latter subsumption, it is argued, is a particular, regressive ‘repetition of the national’, at the level of cultural representation, on the terrain of the global. (shrink)

William Whewell (1794–1866), polymathic Victorian scientist, philosopher, historian, and educator, was one of the great neologists of the nineteenth century. Although Whewell's name is little remembered today except by professional historians and philosophers of science, researchers in many scientific fields work each day in a world that Whewell named. "Miocene" and "Pliocene," "uniformitarian" and "catastrophist," "anode" and "cathode," even the word "scientist" itself—all of these were Whewell coinages. Whewell is particularly important to students of the historical sciences for another (...) word he coined, one that was unfortunately not as successful as many of his others because it is difficult to pronounce. This word, "palaetiology," was the name Whewell gave to the class of sciences that are concerned with historical causation: the class we might today refer to as historical sciences. Although the disciplines Whewell included under the heading of palaetiology might seem to cut across conventional academic boundaries of his day and ours—his exemplary palaetiological sciences were geology and comparative philology—all these fields may be examined together, Whewell argued, because of their common interest in reconstructing the past. ¶ This paper is an essay in the palaetiological sciences, dedicated to Whewell on the bicentennial of his birth, an essay that examines some of the principles, maxims, and rules of procedure that these sciences have all in common. Its first purpose is to demonstrate the continuing validity of Whewell's classification of these sciences through a study of historical representation in three different palaetiological fields: systematics, historical linguistics, and textual transmission. Its second purpose is to continue the development of an extended analogy between historical representation and cartographic representation that I began in an earlier paper (O'Hara, 1993, Systematic Biology), an analogy that makes especially clear the common representational practices that are found throughout palaetiology. (shrink)

In his ontology, Badiou operates with historical situations that are identified as situations whose representation regime is prone to change. Similarly, his Greater Logic operates with changes and modifications of the transcendental related to a change in a particular world determined by its transcendental. In both ontology and logic, Badiou often loosely relates the occurrence of change to temporality, but the operative concept of temporality remains unclear. The paper aims to provide a concept of temporality, borrowed from physics, and (...) which seems consistent with Badiou’s system of thought and helps in comprehending it. We use this concept of time, which explicitly links disorder and temporality in an attempt to elucidate certain parts of Badiou’s ontology and logic. (shrink)

What is a “historical” video game, let alone a successful one? It is difficult to answer this question because all our definitions of history have been constructed in a linear-narrative cultural context that is currently being challenged and in large part displaced by digital media, especially video games. I therefore consider this question from the point of view of historical semantics and in relation to the impact of digital technology on all aspects of the historiographical operation, from the (...) establishment of digital archives, to the production of e-texts, to the digital remediation of visual modes of historical representation. Seen from this dual perspective, video games appear to participate in a process of spatialization and virtualization of historical semantics. In the first place, video games have begun to detach the notion of history from its double reference to the past and to the real—“what essentially happened”—that it had acquired at the end of the eighteenth century. Second, they also challenge the semiotic production of “historic events” that has characterized the construction of modern historical consciousness. Historical video games, in other words, replace representation with simulation and presence with virtuality, thereby marginalizing the oscillation of the modern historical imagination between historical facts and historic events, transcendence and immanence, representation and presence. Although digital reworkings of historical semantics have not produced any grammatical transformation of the signifier, history—nor does this essay propose one—I do argue that the impact of video games on our contemporary historic culture is of paradigmatic proportions similar to those described by Reinhart Koselleck for the dawn of the modern age. Focusing on one of the most successful contemporary video games, Sid Meier’s Civilization, I show how the remediation of cinematic genres by video games is pushing the processes of de-temporalization and de-referentialization of history toward the formation of a new notion of the historical that may be conceptualized as the inversion of the classic Aristotelian paradigm: history has replaced poetry and philosophy as the realm of the possible. (shrink)

The two essays included here are parts of a longer study of temporality, and the genesis of the “religious.” The first part, “Multiple Nows,” depicts a universe in which a present to past relation is establishable from any and every point in consciousness. The resulting perspective differs from that offered by the linear timeline of chronological history. Remembering where I put my glasses is an historicizing act, as fully as is remembering when the Battle of Zama was fought or who (...) won there. On this alternate view of temporality the genesis of the historical perspective is the historicizing subject. The second essay, “The History of a House,” places the observer before an historical structure, then asks where the historicity in the structure is. We discover that the historicity is put there by the observer/subject. This discovery resembles our earlier discovery that historicity is generated by an infinite sequence of nows. The two essays converge on a description of historical cognition as subject-generated. (shrink)

Worlds are always in motion; what kind of movement is at stake? In this essay, I will argue that Heidegger moves beyond Hegel by making the concept of world central to phenomenology. But how do wor...

This study consists of two parts. The first is an examination of the hermeneutical presuppositions underlying the theory of models that Moshe Idel has applied to the study of Jewish mysticism. Idel has opted for a typological approach based on multiple explanatory models, a methodology that purportedly proffers a polychromatic as opposed to a monochromatic orientation associated with Scholem and the so-called school based on his teachings. The three major models delineated by Idel are the theosophical-theurgical, the ecstatic, and the (...) magical or talismanic. Idel’s hermeneutic rests on the assumption that the phenomenon of Jewish mysticism (as the phenomenon of religion more generally) cannot be essentialized, and therefore no one methodological approach should be privileged as the exclusive means to ascertain it. In the second part of this study, I raise the possibility that affirming set patterns of thought and a unified system of symbols that link together kabbalists from different historical periods might not inevitably implicate the scholar in a methodological reductionism. Moving beyond a binary logic, which is still operative in the postmodern dichotomy of truth and dissimulation, I surmise that the polysemic nature of the text that may be elicited from kabbalistic sources is not dependent on the rejection of laying claim to an inherent and original intent that is recoverable through proper philological attunement. Multivocality and essentialism are not mutually exclusive. Kabbalah, I submit, is a cultural-literary phenomenon that illustrates an open system in which each moment is a mix of newness and repetition, each event a renewed singularity. The hermeneutical praxis appropriate to this system displays a temporality linked to the conception of time in its most rudimentary form as an instant of diremptive reiteration, the repetition of the same as different in the renewal of the different as same. The tendency to generalize, therefore, should not be misconstrued as viewing the variegated history of Jewish mystical doctrines and practices monolithically. (shrink)

How does art – literature, visual art, or music – endure over time? What special power does it possess that enables it to “transcend” time – to overcome temporal distance and speak to us not just as evidence of times gone by, but as a living presence? The Renaissance, which discovered this transcendent power of art in the classical sculpture and literature it admired so strongly, concluded that great art is impervious to time – “timeless”, “immortal”, “eternal” – a belief (...) that left a profound impression on Renaissance culture and often found expression in its poetry. Subsequently the same belief exerted a powerful influence on Enlightenment aesthetics and, in various forms, it still lingers on today. The nineteenth century, however, saw a major challenge to this thinking. Hegel, Marx and Taine stressed the historical embeddedness of art and for these three thinkers, as for a series of more recent theorists such as Sartre, Benjamin, and Adorno, art belongs within the world of historical change. To locate its essential qualities in a “timeless” realm removed from the flow of history would be an idealist illusion. The conflict between these two positions has resulted in an impasse, and today we appear to lack any viable account of one of art’s key features – its capacity to transcend time. André Malraux proposes an entirely new account of this unique power of art. For Malraux, as this article explains, art is neither exempt from history (timeless) nor wholly inseparable from it. Art overcomes temporal distance – transcends time – through metamorphosis, a process of continual transformation in significance in which history plays an essential, but not exclusive, part. “La métamorphose,” Malraux writes, “est la vie même de l’œuvre d’art dans le temps, l’un de ses caractères spécifiques.” This proposition, to which contemporary aesthetics has so far paid very little attention, is a revolutionary step in our thinking about art. -/- . (shrink)

The paper offers a reconstruction of the logics of jazz improvisation that is drawing on Žižek’s Work on Hegel. A basic concept of Žižek’s reading of Hegel consists in the concept of Retroactivity as the temporality that is characteristic of what Hegel understands as the development of history. The logic of retroactivity cannot be understood in terms of a classical teleological account but rather draws upon the idea of incommensurable events: Each historical situation is presupposing its own preconditions in (...) a way that the contingent is transformed into necessity. The paper discusses the structure of the temporality of jazz in such a way that it can be informed by Žižek’s thoughts on the temporal logic of history. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

This paper advances a fresh theorization of historicity. The word and concept of historicity has become so widespread and popular that they have ceased to have definite meaning and are used to stand for unsupported notions of the values inherent in human experience. This paper attempts to repair the concept by re-defining it as the temporal aspect of the interdependence of life; having history is to have a life intertwined with the lives of all others and with the universe. After (...) separating out the looser uses, surveying some of the literature, and defining what needs to be done, the paper examines shortcomings in the very different and widely influential conceptions of historicity of Koselleck and Heidegger. It then advances a new conception and fits it into the theoretical and moral capabilities of the philosophy of history as a core of philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

We introduce a methodology whereby an arbitrary logic system L can be enriched with temporal features to create a new system T(L). The new system is constructed by combining L with a pure propositional temporal logic T (such as linear temporal logic with Since and Until) in a special way. We refer to this method as adding a temporal dimension to L or just temporalising L. We show that the logic system T(L) preserves several properties of the original temporal logic (...) like soundness, completeness, decidability, conservativeness and separation over linear flows of time. We then focus on the temporalisation of first-order logic, and a comparison is make with other first-order approaches to the handling of time. (shrink)

In many facets of Western culture, including archaeology, there remains a legacy of perceiving gender divisions as natural, innate, and biological in origin. This belief follows that men are naturally pre-disposed to public, intellectual pursuits, while women are innately designed to care for the home and take care of children. In the interpretation of material culture, accepted notions of gender roles are often applied to new findings: the dichotomy between the domestic sphere of women and the public sphere of men (...) can color interpretations of new materials. In this innovative volume, the contributors focus explicitly on analyzing the materiality of historic changes in the domestic sphere around the world. Combining a global scope with great temporal depth, chapters in the volume explore how gender ideologies, identities, relationships, power dynamics, and practices were materially changed in the past, thus showing how they could be changed in the future. (shrink)

The aporias of time that Paul Ricœur identifies in the conclusion to his three-volume Time and Narrative offer a fecund starting-point from which to consider how the poetics of narrativity figures in a philosophy of the will. By setting the poetics of narrativity against the aporetics of temporality, Ricoeur highlights the narrative art’s operative power in drawing together incidents and events in answer to time’s dispersion across the present, the past, and the future. In turn, the confession of the limits (...) of narrative opens the way to a broader consideration of the idea of the unity of history in the absence of a meta-historical plot. This idea calls for a reflection on the ethical and political imperative of making freedom a reality for all. By taking the theory of freedom’s actualization as a touchstone, I argue that the vision of a reconciled humanity that for Ricœur is the intended object of the poetics of the will acquires the force of a directive idea. The capacity to refashion the real from within thus proves to be decisive for drawing out the connection between the aporetics of temporality, the poetics of narrativity, and Ricœur’s philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

The article examines how the perception of historical time influences the dynamics of power relations and resistance. It draws on the concept of multitemporality, which posits that different 'temporal regimes' — different experiences of time and different temporal constructions of past, present, and future — can coexist. Drawing on the work of K. Mannheim, H. Rosa, and M. Foucault, the article illustrates that power and resistance operate in different temporal regimes, perceive social change at different speeds, and have different (...) attitudes towards the past and the future. The article explores how the optics of multitemporality can serve resistance politics and have an emancipatory effect. Using Foucault's concepts of power and resistance, it describes specific multitemporal characteristics associated with power and resistance, such as power's tendency to slow down the passage of time and resistance's struggle against the determination of the future. The article considers how the temporal aspect helps power to maintain and strengthen its dominance, while enabling resistance to create alternative future scenarios. It emphasizes that resistance acts as a catalyst for social change and, drawing on the ideas of Foucault and Deleuze, underlines the primacy of resistance over power. It concludes that resistance not only seeks to outpace power in time, but represents a qualitatively different approach to time and history. (shrink)

: This paper offers a preliminary analysis of conceptual change between event concepts. It begins with a brief review of the major findings of cognitive studies on event knowledge. The script model proposed by Schank and Abelson was the first attempt to represent event knowledge. Subsequent cognitive studies indicated that event knowledge is organized in the form of dimensional organizations in which temporally successive actions are related causally. This paper proposes a frame representation to capture and outline the internal structure (...) of event concepts, in particular, their causal connections. The frame representation offers an effective method to analyze the relations between event concepts, and to expose the unique cognitive mechanisms behind conceptual change involved event concepts. Finally this paper shows that the frame representation of event concepts is instrumental to understanding an important historical episode of conceptual change in the context of nineteenth-century optics. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPrevious research has demonstrated that anxious individuals attend to negative emotional information at the expense of other information. This is commonly referred to as attentional bias. The field has historically conceived of this process as relatively static; however, research by [Zvielli, A., Bernstein, A., & Koster, E. H. W.. Dynamics of attentional bias to threat in anxious adults: Bias towards and/or away? PLoS ONE, 9, e104025; Zvielli, A., Bernstein, A., & Koster, E. H. W.. Temporal dynamics of attentional bias. Clinical (...) Psychological Science, 3, 772–788.], and others, challenges this assumption by demonstrating considerable temporal variability in attentional bias amongst anxious individuals. Still, the mechanisms driving these temporal dynamics are less well known. Using a modified dot-probe task, the present study examined the impact of two relevant contextual variables- affective valence and trial repetition. Affective context was instantiated by the presentation of... (shrink)

Analysis of the state and possible options for the development of modern humanities gives the grounds to assert the growing importance of the idea of historicity in culture and philosophy during the 20th and early 21st centuries. In this regard, both the disclosure of the concept of historicity and the substantiation of the significance of the principle of historicity, both for the methodology of historical and philosophical knowledge and for humanitarian knowledge in general become relevant. The author of this (...) article carries out historical and philosophical reconstruction of historical issues in the philosophy of M. Heidegger and reveals the process of converting the idea of historicity into the principle of German existentialism. It is concluded that with the help of historicity M. Heidegger was able to present his own version of phenomenology on an existential basis. Seeing an existential achievement in historicity, M. Heidegger understood by it the direction of existence to the source, tradition, on the basis of this, the intentionality of consciousness was revealed as an essential property of existence: the direction of man as a finite being to its source, which allowed the German philosopher to interpret historicity as a tradition, the existential source of man, and how the temporality of human existence. The author of this article concludes that in the philosophy of M. Heidegger historicity was transformed from an idea into a principle on the basis of which the German philosopher revealed not only the historicity of Dasein, building a fundamental ontology and hermeneutics of factuality, but also tried to solve the problem of the history of being, going beyond the existential philosophy. (shrink)

Plural Temporality traces out a dynamic historical relationship between the texts of Spinoza and of Althusser. It interrogates Spinoza's text through Althusser and vice versa regarding the question of materialism.

We present an introductory survey of temporal and dynamic logics: logics for reasoning about how environments change over time, and how dynamic processes affect their environments.We begin by introducing the historical development of temporal and dynamic logic, starting with the seminal work of Prior. This leads to a discussion of the use of temporal and dynamic logic in computer science. We describe LTL, CTL, and PDL; three key formalisms used in computer science for reasoning about programs, and illustrate how (...) these formalisms may be used in the formal specification and verification of computer systems.We then discuss interval temporal logics.We conclude with some pointers for further reading. (shrink)

This article is a systematic consideration of aristotle's position vis-a-vis modern tendencies to judge all philosophical positions as historically conditioned. the argument shows that aristotle's position is not only not reducible to historical temporality but is transcendent of it. the article, which contains original translations of key passages in the metaphysics and physics and refers to the de anima, topica, poetics, nicomachean ethics, rhetorica, and history of animals, points to the author's own systematic philosophy entitled mentaphysics (chiron, 1978). particular (...) stress is laid on the relation between "logos" and "physis" with respect to aristotle's definition of "nous" as finally a divine "zoon". (shrink)

Philosophers' reflections on history have been dominated for decades by two themes: representation and memory. On both of these accounts, historical inquiry is divided by a certain gap from what it seeks to find or wants to know, and its activity is seen by philosophers as that of bridging this gap. Against this background, the concept of experience, in spite of its apparent rootedness in the present, can be revived as a means of thinking about our connection to the (...) past. After examining variants on the concept of experience, with special attention to its temporality, I argue in this essay that experience can be said to furnish a connection to the past that underlies both memory and representation. (shrink)

Despite an attempt to break with the hierarchical picture in traditional emergentist thought, non-standard accounts of emergence are often still committed to a premise that ontology is prior to epistemology. This paper aims to topple this last remnant of the traditional hierarchy by explicating a pragmatic view of emergence based on John Dewey’s work. Dewey argued that the traditional notion of ontology is premised on a view of existence as complete. Through a discussion of Dewey’s work it is argued that (...) this premise results in a process of reification that unduly excludes from ontology many precarious and indeterminate aspects involved both in everyday life and in philosophic and scientific inquiry. Building on a recent explication of transformational emergence the paper proposes a diachronic and non-hierarchical account of emergence, called pragmatic emergence. According to that account the relation between ontology and epistemology is a temporally reciprocal one. This means that ontological and epistemological features co-determine each other over time. Determinacy and continuity become historical features of a multitude of unfinished processes that we view from within. (shrink)

The Anthropocene debates are rooted in epistemological differences. Geologists seek temporal markers of spatially even anthropogenic impact. Thus, they favor geologic data that fit this category. Humanists and social scientists, on the other hand, tend to focus on the negative effects of spatial unevenness. Without linking the Anthropocene’s temporal and spatial components, the official designation, ultimately determined by geologists, will be a futile exercise that will not make good on the Anthropocene Working Group’s intention for it to be useful for (...) wider segments of society. However, if the Anthropocene is divided into an Early, Middle, and Late Anthropocene, each defined by geologic evidence, the uneven spatial distributions of anthropogenic damage can be traced to specific events in human history, thus actualizing the predictive value of geology. Further, this diachronic scheme, unlike the synchronic ones thus far proposed, makes more legible two fundamental dynamics between human and natural trajectories: the intensification of global inequity coterminous with the intensification of natural damage; and humanity’s ever more audacious attempts to control the environment. This ethos, wielded as the prime justification for taking over that which belonged to cultures not espousing it, has resulted in anthropogenic damage disproportionately affecting the most economically and historically vulnerable peoples. However, their alternative modes of coping with the damages—an ineluctable responsiveness to, rather than control over, environment—enables them to survive. As such, they could lead the way through the Anthropocene, modeling adaptation and mitigation strategies, and obviating the global North’s unsound hope for a technological solution. Three metropolitan architects, Rem Koolhaas, David Adjaye, and V. Mitch McEwen, look to global Southern urbanisms––improvisational, creative, minimalist praxes grounded in indigenous lifeways––for alternate modes of inhabiting anthropocenic modernity. Likewise, New Zealand’s government has materially and ethically mitigated its legacy of settler colonialism by combining Western scientific data with indigenous knowledge to formulate more adaptive, responsive, integrative approaches to environment. By expanding the data beyond the stratigraphic, coordinated interdisciplinary research can measure variegated effects of––and responses to––the Anthropocene, thus better equipping humanity to adapt to and/or mitigate climate change and to eschew unsustainable practices. (shrink)

A seemingly unitary appeal to history might evoke today two incompatible operations of historicization that yield contradictory results. This article attempts to understand two co-existing senses of historicity as conflicting ideas of historical change and rival practices of temporal comparison: historicism and constructionism. At their respective births, both claimed to make sense of the world and ourselves as changing over time. Historicism, dominating nineteenth-century Western thought and overseeing the professionalization of historical studies, advocated an understanding of the present (...) condition of the human world as developing out of past conditions. Constructionism, dominating the second half of the twentieth century, understood the present condition as the recent invention of certain ‘historical’ environments, without prior existence. As competing ideas of historical change, they both entail a comparison between past and present conditions of their investigated subjects, but their practices of temporal comparison are irreconcilable and represent two distinct ways of historicization. (shrink)

This chapter offers a overview of Shadworth Hodgson's account of experience as fundamentally temporal, an account that was deeply influential on thinkers such as William James and which prefigures the phenomenology of Husserl in many ways. I highlight eight key features that are characteristic of Hodgson's account, and how they hang together to provide a coherent overall picture of experience and knowledge. Hodgson's account is then compared to Husserl's, and I argue that Hodgson's account offers a better target for projects (...) such as neurophenomenology than does Husserl's. Hodgson's account is historically important as a culmination of a certain trajectory of British Empiricist thought. It offers a substantive alternative for how to think about temporality and experience in contemporary discussions, not just of the present moment but of the relationship between experience and knowledge more broadly. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to identify the influence of the temporality of Enlightenment on the genesis and evolution of classical ideologies of Modernity. The scientific novelty it consists in the fact that the classical ideologies of modernity are presented as competing strategies for the appropriation of time by collective subjects of historical dynamics. In conservatism, the object of appropriation is an idealized past, in liberalism – an intense present, in Marxism – a bright future. As a result, (...) it can be concluded that it was the presence of a trimodal ideology, which included conservatism, liberalism and Marxism, that created the prerequisites for the simultaneous existence and dynamic development of multiple Modernities implemented within the framework of a common cultural and civilizational project. (shrink)