Thucydides

Thucydides

Thucydides wrote a history of the epic struggle between Athens and Sparta. His work has proved to be—as he hoped—a “possession for all time,” though perhaps not in quite the way he intended. Virtually every age, every occasion, every interpreter, has appropriated a different Thucydides and a different masterpiece. Both the author and the work remain enigmatic.

The reliable biographical details are few, and all derive from his own account. Thucydides son of Olorus was an Athenian, born around 460 BCE. In his analysis of the causes, symptoms, and consequences of the plague that devastated Athens a few years after the outbreak of hostilities with Sparta, Thucydides drew on his own experience of the illness. He was for a time prominent in Athenian public life.

During the war, he attained the office of general, one of the very few elected positions in the Athenian democracy (most offices were allocated by lot), and was sent to Thrace, perhaps because of his connections and influence there. In 423 BCE, his fellow citizens banished him for failing to reach the Athenian colony of Amphipolis in time to rescue it from the Spartans.

Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich, the German American theologian, was born in Starzeddel in eastern Germany, the son of a Lutheran pastor. He received a theological and philosophical education and was ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1912. He served as an army chaplain during World War I and then taught theology and philosophy at Berlin, Marburg, Dresden, and Frankfurt.

On Adolf Hitler’s advent to power in 1933, Tillich immigrated to the United States, serving as professor of systematic theology and philosophy of religion at Union Theological Seminary from 1933 to 1956. From 1956 until his death he held chairs at Harvard and at the University of Chicago.

Anxiety

Tillich’s religious thought has been enormously influential, particularly in English-speaking countries. He was strongly influenced by existentialism, and he held, as did Søren Kierkegaard, that religious questions are appropriately raised only in relation to problems that are inherent in the “human situation” and that theological claims are not mere responses to theoretical puzzles.

Time

Time

Time has frequently struck philosophers as mysterious. Some have even felt that it was incapable of rational discursive treatment and that it was able to be grasped only by intuition.

This defeatist attitude probably arises because time always seems to be mysteriously slipping away from us; no sooner do we grasp a bit of it in our consciousness than it has slipped away into the past. This entry will argue, however, that this notion of time as something that continually passes is based on a confusion.

St. Augustine’s Puzzles

The apparent mysteriousness of time can make puzzles about time seem more baffling than they are, even though similar ones arise in the case of nontemporal concepts. St. Augustine, in his Confessions, asks, “What is time?” When no one asks him, he knows; when someone asks him, however, he does not know.

Consciousness of Time

Consciousness of Time

William James’s discussion of the perception of time in Principles of Psychology provides a convenient starting point for a discussion of the “consciousness of time.” James’s main concern was to give an empiricist account of our temporal concepts.

This is clear from the Lockean question with which he started: “What is the original of our experience of pastness, from whence we get the meaning of the term?” and from his answer that the “prototype of all conceived times is the specious present, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible”.

A contemporary empiricist might formulate James’s thesis thus: that all other temporal concepts can be defined in terms of the relation “earlier than” and that this relation is sense given or can be ostensively defined so that even if a person does not use the term specious present, he is obliged to say that some earlier events are still, in some sense, present to us when we are sensing a later event.

Time in Continental Philosophy

Time in Continental Philosophy

The attempt to conceive time, time’s relation to human experience, and the makeup of the universe is perhaps the central problem of twentieth-century Continental philosophy. Time emerged as a central problem in late nineteenth century German philosophy where temporality became increasingly identified with consciousness and mind.

Franz Brentano’s work provided an impetus for Edmund Husserl’s analyses of internal time-consciousness, and Wilhelm Dilthey and Husserl were both influential for Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. In France, before these phenomenological approaches had been worked out, Henri Bergson reconceived time in a way that anticipated them and profoundly influenced later French thought.

In general, Bergson calls on metaphysics (that is, Platonism and its latest version in Kant) to embrace the reality of movement, change, becoming, and time. The originality of this thinking consists in differentiating between abstract representations of time and the immediate givenness of pure duration in consciousness.

Time in Physics

Time in Physics

No one conception of time emerges from a study of physics. One’s understanding of physical time changes as science itself changes, either through the development of new theories or through new interpretations of a theory.

Each of these changes and resulting theories of time has been the subject of philosophical scrutiny, so there are many philosophical controversies internal to particular physical theories. For instance, the move to special relativity gave rise to debates about the nature of simultaneity within the theory itself, such as whether simultaneity is conventional.

Nevertheless, there are some philosophical puzzles that appear at every stage of the development of physics. Perhaps most generally, there is the perennial question, Is there a “gap” between the conception of time as found in physics and the conception of time as found in philosophy?

John Toland

John Toland

John Toland was an English deist, philosopher, diplomat, political controversialist, secular and biblical scholar, and linguist. Christened “Janus Junius” in the Roman Catholic Church, Toland later took the name of John.

He was born near Londonderry, Ireland, possibly of partial French extraction. At the age of sixteen he ran away from school to become a Protestant Whig. In 1687 he turned up at Glasgow University and in 1690 was awarded an MA at Edinburgh University.

For two years he studied at the University of Leiden under Friedrich Spanheim the younger, and in 1694 he settled at Oxford for some time to carry on research in the Bodleian Library. “The Character you bear in Oxford,” he was informed by a correspondent, “is this; that you are a man of fine parts, great learning, and little religion.”