Church Time and Astrological Time in the Waning Middle Ages

2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 117-132
Author(s):  
Hilary M. Carey

Time, according to medieval theologians and philosophers, was experienced in radically different ways by God and by his creation. Indeed, the obligation to dwell in time, and therefore to have no sure knowledge of what was to come, was seen as one of the primary qualities which marked the post-lapsarian state. When Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden of delights, they entered a world afflicted with the changing of the seasons, in which they were obliged to work and consume themselves with the needs of the present day and the still unknown dangers of the next. Medieval concerns about the use and abuse of time were not merely confined to anxiety about the present, or awareness of seized or missed opportunities in the past. The future was equally worrying, in particular the extent to which this part of time was set aside for God alone, or whether it was permissible to seek to know the future, either through revelation and prophecy, or through science. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the scientific claims of astrology to provide a means to explain the outcome of past and future events, circumventing God’s distant authority, became more and more insistent. This paper begins by examining one skirmish in this larger battle over the control of the future.

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 631
Author(s):  
Arno Böhler

The following lecture performance was a part of the research festival Philosophy On Stage#4 at Tanzquartier Wien, where new relations between philosophy and the arts were tested and put into practice. The lecture starts with the claim that philosophical thinking necessarily performs the temporality of the untimely as a mode of being-in-time, which realises a revolt of time against its times in favour of a time to come. Being neither part of the past nor of eternity, the temporality of the untimely calls future events into being.Insofar as philosophy shares the temporality of the untimely with the arts, the lecture-performance defines arts-based philosophy––the alliance of art and philosophy, by which philosophy has started to implement artistic practices into philosophy––as a field for the appearance of the untimely. As Jacques Derrida has shown in Politics of Friendship, the proposition “Alas! if only you knew how soon, how very soon, things will be – different! –”, characterises precisely the aporetic principle of a democracy of the future, grounded in the temporality of the untimely. The genitive ‘of’ thereby indicates a mode of democracy which does only exist as long as it keeps itself open towards its own changeability and eventfulness. Therefore it necessarily takes place as the prelude of a future one is able to affirm full heartedly in advance, that is to say, over and over again. A mode of being-in-time that touches the secret of Nietzsche’s most abysmal thought: the thought of the eternal return of the same, in which somebody has realized the never ending eternity loops of be-coming; a life of immanence; a recurring movement of eternity within itself.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Rachel Wagner

Here I build upon Robert Orsi’s work by arguing that we can see presence—and the longing for it—at work beyond the obvious spaces of religious practice. Presence, I propose, is alive and well in mediated apocalypticism, in the intense imagination of the future that preoccupies those who consume its narratives in film, games, and role plays. Presence is a way of bringing worlds beyond into tangible form, of touching them and letting them touch you. It is, in this sense, that Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward observe the “re-emergence” of religion with a “new visibility” that is much more than “simple re-emergence of something that has been in decline in the past but is now manifesting itself once more.” I propose that the “new awareness of religion” they posit includes the mediated worlds that enchant and empower us via deeply immersive fandoms. Whereas religious institutions today may be suspicious of presence, it lives on in the thick of media fandoms and their material manifestations, especially those forms that make ultimate promises about the world to come.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147612702110120
Author(s):  
Siavash Alimadadi ◽  
Andrew Davies ◽  
Fredrik Tell

Research on the strategic organization of time often assumes that collective efforts are motivated by and oriented toward achieving desirable, although not necessarily well-defined, future states. In situations surrounded by uncertainty where work has to proceed urgently to avoid an impending disaster, however, temporal work is guided by engaging with both desirable and undesirable future outcomes. Drawing on a real-time, in-depth study of the inception of the Restoration and Renewal program of the Palace of Westminster, we investigate how organizational actors develop a strategy for an uncertain and highly contested future while safeguarding ongoing operations in the present and preserving the heritage of the past. Anticipation of undesirable future events played a crucial role in mobilizing collective efforts to move forward. We develop a model of future desirability in temporal work to identify how actors construct, link, and navigate interpretations of desirable and undesirable futures in their attempts to create a viable path of action. By conceptualizing temporal work based on the phenomenological quality of the future, we advance understanding of the strategic organization of time in pluralistic contexts characterized by uncertainty and urgency.


Philosophy ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Stoneham

AbstractThere are many questions we can ask about time, but perhaps the most fundamental is whether there are metaphysically interesting differences between past, present and future events. An eternalist believes in a block universe: past, present and future events are all on an equal footing. A gradualist believes in a growing block: he agrees with the eternalist about the past and the present but not about the future. A presentist believes that what is present has a special status. My first claim is that the familiar ways of articulating these views result in there being no substantive disagreement at all between the three parties. I then show that if we accept the controversial truthmaking principle, we can articulate a substantive disagreement. Finally, I apply this way of formulating the debate to related questions such as the open future and determinism, showing that these do not always line up in quite the way one would expect.


2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Judith Middleton-Stewart

There were many ways in which the late medieval testator could acknowledge time. Behind each testator lay a lifetime of memories and experiences on which he or she drew, recalling the names of those ‘they had fared the better for’, those they wished to remember and by whom they wished to be remembered. Their present time was of limited duration, for at will making they had to assemble their thoughts and their intentions, make decisions and appoint stewards, as they prepared for their time ahead; but as they spent present time arranging the past, so they spent present time laying plans for the future. Some testators had more to bequeath, more time to spare: others had less to leave, less time to plan. Were they aware of time? How did they control the future? In an intriguing essay, A. G. Rigg asserts that ‘one of the greatest revolutions in man’s perception of the world around him was caused by the invention, sometime in the late thirteenth century, of the mechanical weight-driven clock.’ It is the intention of this paper to see how men’s (and women’s) perception of time in the late Middle Ages was reflected in their wills, the most personal papers left by ordinary men and women of the period.


Author(s):  
Elliot R. Wolfson
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
To Come ◽  

This chapter addresses the co-dependence of people's conceptions of end and of beginning. To comprehend the beginning, one must think of it from the perspective of futurity, from the perspective, that is, of the ultimate end. Consequently, the beginning lies not in the past but, rather, in the future. The chapter then relates this mode of philosophizing with the way people understand Jewish eschatology, which lies at the center of Jewish theorization about time. In Jewish eschatology, what is yet to come is understood as what has already happened, whereas what has happened is derived from what is yet to come. Martin Heidegger has dismissed Judaism as a religion that by its very nature cannot experience temporality authentically. Yet his own understanding of temporality accords well with rabbinic conceptions of temporality and later kabbalistic eschatologies.


Cyber Crime ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 1016-1042 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debarati Halder ◽  
K. Jaishankar

In this chapter, an attempt is made to operationally define cyber crimes against women, as we have found that the definitions of cyber crimes have changed in the past decade and we presume that even this will change in the future decades to come. In addition, the current definitions do not specifically fit in to the nitty-gritty issues of cyber crimes against women and a succinct operational definition is provided. A new set of typology is made with regard to the cyber crimes against women as not all type of crimes fit to the category of cyber crimes against women. The patterns of victimization of women in cyberspace are dealt by qualitative case studies along with the typology.


In this chapter, an attempt is made to operationally define cyber crimes against women, as we have found that the definitions of cyber crimes have changed in the past decade and we presume that even this will change in the future decades to come. In addition, the current definitions do not specifically fit in to the nitty-gritty issues of cyber crimes against women and a succinct operational definition is provided. A new set of typology is made with regard to the cyber crimes against women as not all type of crimes fit to the category of cyber crimes against women. The patterns of victimization of women in cyberspace are dealt by qualitative case studies along with the typology.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-91
Author(s):  
Cajetan Iheka

Mineral extraction in Africa has exacerbated ecological degradation across the continent. This article focuses on the example of the Niger Delta scene of oil exploration depicted in Michael Watts and Ed Kashi’s multimedia project, Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta. Analyzing the infringement on human and nonhuman bodies due to fossil fuel extraction, I read the Delta, inscribed in Watts and Kashi’s image-text, as an ecology of suffering and as a site of trauma. Although trauma studies tend to foreground the past and the present, I argue that Curse of the Black Gold invites serious consideration of trauma of the future, of-the-yet-to-come, in apprehending the problematic of suffering in the Delta. I conclude with a discussion of the ethics of representing postcolonial wounding, which on the one hand can create awareness of ecological degradation and generate affect, but which on the other hand, exploits the vulnerability of the depicted and leaves an ecological footprint.


1982 ◽  
Vol 15 (02) ◽  
pp. 180-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph LaPalombara

Political scientists are only now, and dimly, beginning to recognize that something called “political risk analysis” (PRA) is very much in vogue in the corporate and banking communities of this country. Any attempt to assess this uncommon development should begin with this question: Why would any banker or corporate manager wish to spend hard cash on anything political scientists might have to say about places overseas where banks and multinational corporations lend or invest their capital? After all, the profession is not exactly distinguished by its ability to make accurate forecasts. Indeed, Sartori has argued that political scientists ought to eschew forecasting entirely in that they are best able to explain what happened as opposed to what may come to pass.Sartori's assertion of course would make historians of us all—and burden us with the historian's smug claim that, if the history examined is too recent, the immediacy of events will distort our vision and bias our judgments. Thus, rather than try to foretell where, say, Germany will move politically next year we should expend (more!) of our resources to establish once and for all what really caused Weimar to collapse and Hitler to come to power.This is not the stuff of political risk analysis. Growing interest in this activity is little based on broad analyses of the past or on long-term forecasts of future events. The potential consumers of political assessments are intelligent, harried bankers and corporate managers who are pressed to make relatively short-term decisions that affect the viability of enterprise and investment-and, equally important, careers-in professions where tenure is unknown.


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