scholarly journals TIME AS A METAPHYSICAL DILEMMA: JOSE LUIS BORGES’ TREATMENT OF THE NATURE OF TIME IN HIS SELECTED WORKS

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Tukumbeje Mposa
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Past ◽  
Major Subject ◽  
The Future ◽  
Current Article ◽  
Nature Of Time ◽  
Perception Of Time ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Linear Manner

The concept of time, which has been a major subject of study in various fields, defies a neat definition. Many scholars have failed to define it in a manner applicable to all fields. Generally, time can be defined as the unlimited continued progress of existence and events in the past, present and future, regarded as a whole. It is a measure in which events can be ordered from the past through the present into the future. Some schools of thought deny the existence of time. They argue that the present is undefined and indefinite; and the future has no reality except as present recollection. In some of his works, Jose Luis Borges (1899–1986) describes time in a linear manner, that is to say, that humans experience time as a series of present moments, one following the other. The past and the future both exist nowhere but in the human mind. Borges seems to agree with the notion that time is but a figment of the mind. In other stories, his perception of time is circular. Thus, the focus of the current article is on time, which is a metaphysical dilemma, and Borges’ treatment of the nature of time in his selected works.

‘Newness which never perishes’? Schoenberg’s ambivalent reception of Haydn

2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 215-224
Author(s):  
Alexander Carpenter
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The Past ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Future ◽  
Music Tradition

This paper explores Arnold Schoenberg’s curious ambivalence towards Haydn. Schoenberg recognized Haydn as an important figure in the German serious music tradition, but never closely examined or clearly articulated Haydn’s influence and import on his own musical style and ethos, as he did with many other major composers. This paper argues that Schoenberg failed to explicitly recognize Haydn as a major influence because he saw Haydn as he saw himself, namely as a somewhat ungainly, paradoxical figure, with one foot in the past and one in the future. In his voluminous writings on music, Haydn is mentioned by Schoenberg far less frequently than Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven, and his music appears rarely as examples in Schoenberg’s theoretical texts. When Schoenberg does talk about Haydn’s music, he invokes — with tacit negativity — its accessibility, counterpoising it with more recondite music, such as Beethoven’s, or his own. On the other hand, Schoenberg also praises Haydn for his complex, irregular phrasing and harmonic exploration. Haydn thus appears in Schoenberg’s writings as a figure invested with ambivalence: a key member of the First Viennese triumvirate, but at the same time he is curiously phantasmal, and is accorded a peripheral place in Schoenberg’s version of the canon and his own musical genealogy.

Time and the Testator, 1370–1540

2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Judith Middleton-Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Perception Of Time ◽  
Limited Duration ◽  
At Will

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.

scholarly journals Anti-Memorials and the Art of Forgetting: Critical Reflections on a Memorial Design Practice

2008 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
SueAnne Ware
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Complex Spectrum ◽  
Design Practice ◽  
Design Work ◽  
The Past ◽  
Heroin Overdose ◽  
The Future ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
Over Time

Andreas Huyssen writes, ‘Remembrance as a vital human activity shapes our links to the past, and the ways we remember define us in the present. As individuals and societies, we need the past to construct and to anchor our identities and to nurture a vision of the future.’ Memory is continually affected by a complex spectrum of states such as forgetting, denial, repression, trauma, recounting and reconsidering, stimulated by equally complex changes in context and changes over time. The apprehension and reflective comprehension of landscape is similarly beset by such complexities. Just as the nature and qualities of memory comprise inherently fading, shifting and fleeting impressions of things which are themselves ever-changing, an understanding of a landscape, as well as the landscape itself, is a constantly evolving, emerging response to both immense and intimate influences. There is an incongruity between the inherent changeability of both landscapes and memories, and the conventional, formal strategies of commemoration that typify the constructed landscape memorial. The design work presented in this paper brings together such explorations of memory and landscape by examining the ‘memorial’. This article examines two projects. One concerns the fate of illegal refugees travelling to Australia: The SIEVX Memorial Project. The other, An Anti-Memorial to Heroin Overdose Victims, was designed by the author as part of the 2001 Melbourne Festival.

scholarly journals The fiction of History: recalling the past and imagining the future with Caesar at Troy.

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 143-160
Author(s):  
Richard Alston
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
A Site

This essay considers the nature of historical discourse through a consideration of the historical narrative of Lucan’s Pharsalia. The focus is on the manner in which Lucan depicts history as capable of being fictionalised, especially through the operation of political power. The discourses of history make a historical account, but those discourses are not, in Lucan's view, true, but are fictionalised. The key study comes from Caesar at Troy, when Lucan explores the idea of a site (and history) which cannot be understood, but which nevertheless can be employed in a representation of the past. yet, Lucan also alludes to a ‘true history’, which is unrepresentable in his account of Pharsalus, and beyond the scope of the human mind. Lucan’s true history can be read against Benjamin and Tacitus. Lucan offers a framework of history that has the potential to be post-Roman (in that it envisages a world in which there is no Rome), and one in which escapes the frames of cultural memory, both in its fictionalisation and in the dependence of Roman imperial memory on cultural trauma.

PERCEPTION OF TIME AMONG COLLEGE STUDENTS AND RESIDENTS OF A METROPOLITAN COMMUNITY

1979 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fredrick Koenig
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Perception Of Time ◽  
The City

A sample of college undergraduates and a sample of residents in the city in which the college is located were asked to draw three circles representing the past, present, and future. Among the college students, 52% indicated future dominance by drawing the future circle largest, while only 44% of the residents of the city did so. Relatedness was indicated by 54% of the students who drew circles that were touching, overlapping, or concentric, while only 11% of the city residents did so. A segment of 14% of the metropolitan sample could not respond to the test at all, but all of the college students were able to.

Threshold

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emanuele Castrucci
Keyword(s):  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Basic Material ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human History ◽  
Biological Basis ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Mind

The human mind has phased out its traditional anchorage in a natural biological basis (the «reasons of the body» which even Spinoza’s Ethics could count on) – an anchorage that had determined, for at least two millennia, historically familiar forms of culture and civilisation. Increasingly emphasising its intellectual disembodiment, it has come to the point of establishing in a completely artificial way the normative conditions of social behaviour and the very ontological collocation of human beings in general. If in the past ‘God’ was the name that mythopoietic activity had assigned to the world’s overall moral order, which was reflected onto human behaviour, now the progressive freeing of the mind – by way of the intellectualisation of life and technology – from the natural normativity which was previously its basic material reference opens up unforeseen vistas of power. Freedom of the intellect demands (or so one believes) the full artificiality of the normative human order in the form of an artificial logos, and precisely qua artificial, omnipotent. The technological icon of logos (which postmodern dispersion undermines only superficially) definitively unseats the traditional normative, sovereign ‘God’ of human history as he has been known till now. Our West has been irreversibly marked by this process, whose results are as devastating as they are inevitable. The decline predicted a century ago by old Spengler is here served on a platter....

(B) Liberating the Past from the Future

2009 ◽  
pp. 95-102
Author(s):  
Andrew Targowski
Keyword(s):  
Human Development ◽  
The Other ◽  
Information Communication ◽  
The Past ◽  
Intrinsic Values ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Communication Processes ◽  
The Future

The purpose of this chapter is to define intrinsic values of information-communication processes in human development. The development of civilization depends upon the accumulation of wisdom, knowledge and cultural and infrastructural gain. Man is prouder of his heritage than of that which he can eventually achieve in the future. The future is often the threat of the imminent unknown, something that can destroy our stability, qualifications and position within society. On the other hand, the “future” is also the hope of the desperate for a better life.

Locke’s Inclinations

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-176
Author(s):  
Stewart Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Substance P ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
The Other ◽  
Animal Minds ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Mind

Locke is officially agnostic about the nature of the human mind: he thinks we cannot know that materialism is true, but also that we cannot know that dualism is true. Despite this agnosticism, we can ask whether Locke thought one of those views was more likely than the other. The chapter considers arguments on both sides. A small number of texts suggest he thought dualism more likely. On the other hand, Lisa Downing has argued that Locke thought materialism more likely, on the basis of the similarities between human and animal minds. This chapter argues that the reasons she offers do not show us that Locke was inclined to materialism. Nevertheless, Locke did show the possibility of materialism, not just by saying it was possible, but by developing at length an account of the mind that did not depend upon its being an immaterial substance.

The Limited Compatibilism of Epiphenomenalism with Responsibility

2020 ◽  
pp. 413-434
Author(s):  
Michael S. Moore
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
General Control ◽  
Past Event ◽  
The Past ◽  
Hard Determinism ◽  
The Future

The second response to the epiphenomenal challenge is to deny that epiphenomenalism has any implications that are skeptical of responsibility. Such a compatibilist response is seemingly ruled out by adopting the classical compatibilist response to the challenge of hard determinism. Whether this is in fact so is explored in this chapter, the thesis being that in a certain range of cases we are responsible for effects that we do not cause so long as those effects are on one horn of an epiphenomenal fork the existence of which we know and the other horn of which we can control. Because such responsibility across the horns of an epiphenomenal fork can involve control of the past, and because a general control of the past to the extent that we can control the future is implausible, some care is taken to limit the scope of what in the past we can control by our present decisions. These limits are cast in terms of there being a strong necessitation of a past event by a present decision which necessitation is known to the actor as he acts to make it have been the case that such past event occurred.

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