This book presents a novel account of the human temporal dimension called the “human temporality” and develops a special mathematical formalism for describing such an object as the human mind. One of the characteristic features of the human mind is its temporal extent. For objects of physical reality, only the present exists, which may be conceived as a point-like moment in time. In the human temporality, the past retained in the memory, the imaginary future, and the present coexist and are closely intertwined and impact one another. This book focuses on one of the fragments of the human temporality called the complex present. A detailed analysis of the classical and modern concepts has enabled the authors to put forward the idea of the multi-component structure of the present. For the concept of the complex present, the authors proposed a novel account that involves a qualitative description and a special mathematical formalism. This formalism takes into account human goal-oriented behavior and uncertainty in human perception. The present book can be interesting for theoreticians, physicists dealing with modeling systems where the human factor plays a crucial role, philosophers who are interested in applying philosophical concepts to constructing mathematical models, and psychologists whose research is related to modeling mental processes.

A study of the emergence in post-Kantian continental philosophy of a focus on the lived experience of temporality. The project of all philosophy may be to gain reconciliation with time, even if not every philosopher has dealt with time expressly. A confrontation with the passing of time and with human finitude runs through the history of philosophy as an ultimate concern. In this genealogy of the concept of temporality, David Hoy examines the emergence in a post-Kantian continental philosophy of a focus on the lived experience of the “time of our lives” rather than on the time of the universe. The purpose is to see how phenomenological and poststructuralist philosophers have tried to locate the source of temporality, how they have analyzed time's passing, and how they have depicted our relation to time once it has been—in a Proustian sense—regained. Hoy engages with competing theoretical tactics for reconciling us to our fleeting temporality, drawing on work by Kant, Heidegger, Hegel, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Sartre, Bourdieu, Foucault, Bergson, Deleuze, Žižek, and Derrida. Hoy considers four existential strategies for coping with the apparent flow of temporality, including Proust's passive and Walter Benjamin's active reconciliation through memory, Žižek's critique of poststructuralist politics, Foucault's confrontation with the temporality of power, and Deleuze's account of Aion and Chronos. He concludes by exploring whether a dual temporalization could be what constitutes the singular “time of our lives.”

Eldred offers a remedy to the consequences of ancient Greek misconceptions of time that are also entrenched in today’s mathematized physics. Here time is spatialized as the one-dimensionally linear ‘arrow of time’ for the sake of predicting and controlling movement. But such spatialized time distorts the phenomenon of time itself. An alternative, hermeneutic-phenomenological path begins with a pre-spatial concept of time that is genuinely three-dimensional. This paves the way for recasting who we are as humans in belonging, first of all, to the free openness of 3D-temporality. This belonging enables temporally 3D-vision of the psyche that empowers us to see movement at all and reconcile its inherent contradictoriness. We are then also able to conceive ourselves no longer merely as internally cogitating, self-conscious subjects, but as engaged existentially in temporally 3D-interplay, mutually estimating and esteeming who we are. This unpredictable interplay is constrained, however, by being played out in the sociating medium of thingified value, the accumulative movement of thingified value having gained the upper hand in dictating our life-movements as well as our interplay with the earth.

One of TIME’s Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade "Meet the new Stephen Hawking . . . The Order of Time is a dazzling book." --The Sunday Times From the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality Is Not What It Seems, Helgoland, and Anaximander comes a concise, elegant exploration of time. Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to "flow"? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike. For most readers this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it remains. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where at the most fundamental level time disappears. He explains how the theory of quantum gravity attempts to understand and give meaning to the resulting extreme landscape of this timeless world. Weaving together ideas from philosophy, science and literature, he suggests that our perception of the flow of time depends on our perspective, better understood starting from the structure of our brain and emotions than from the physical universe. Already a bestseller in Italy, and written with the poetic vitality that made Seven Brief Lessons on Physics so appealing, The Order of Time offers a profoundly intelligent, culturally rich, novel appreciation of the mysteries of time.

"What is the meaning of being?" This is the central question of Martin Heidegger's profoundly important work, in which the great philosopher seeks to explain the basic problems of existence. A central influence on later philosophy, literature, art, and criticism—as well as existentialism and much of postmodern thought—Being and Time forever changed the intellectual map of the modern world. As Richard Rorty wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "You cannot read most of the important thinkers of recent times without taking Heidegger's thought into account." This first paperback edition of John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson's definitive translation also features a new foreword by Heidegger scholar Taylor Carman.

There is a gap between the concept of time in physics and that in neuroscience. Human time is dynamic and involves a dynamic ‘flow,’ whereas physical time is said to be “frozen" as in Einstein’s Block Universe. The result has been a fierce debate as to which time is ‘real’. Our recently accepted paper by Frontiers provides a compromise, dualistic view. The claim is that within the cranium there already exists an overlooked, complete, and independent physical system of time, that is compatible with the essence of modern spacetime cosmology. However, the brain through a process of evolution developed a complementary illusory system that provides a supplementary, more satisfying experience of temporal experiences that leads to better adaptive behavior. The Dualistic Mind View provides evidence that both systems of time exist and are not competitive. Neither need be denigrated.

"Over the course of history, Fraser argues, human values have served primarily not as conservative influences that promote permanence, continuity, and balance - as commonly believed - but as revolutionary forces that, in the long run, promote change by generating and sustaining certain unresolvable conflicts."--BOOK JACKET.

Particularly valuable to those involved in the management and organizational sciences, since much material from those fields informs the discussion, this book considers several answers to the question of the true nature of time. It demonstrates that humanity creates a variety of times and the times affect the experiences of life—as times vary, so does life.

The First Conference of the International Society for the Study of Time was held at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut at Oberwolfach in the Black Forest, Federal Republic of Germany from Sunday, 31 August to Saturday, 6 September, 1969. The origin of this conference and the formation of the Society goes back to a proposal due to J. T. Fraser that was discussed at a conference on "Interdisciplinary Perspectives of Time" held by the New York Academy of Sciences in January, 1966. It was unanimously agreed than that an international society should be formed on an interdisciplinary basis with the object of stimulating interest in all problems concerning 'time and that this object could best be attained by means of conferences held at regular intervals. J. T. Fraser was elected Secretary, S. Watanabe Treasurer, and I was elected President. It was agreed, at my suggestion, that the organization of the first conference of the newly formed Society be left to a committee of these three officers, on the understanding that they would invite authorities on the role of time in the various special sciences and humanities to form an Advisory Board to assist them. One of the main difficulties in seeking support for an interdisciplinary conference is that most foundations confine their interest exclusively either to the sciences or to the humanities.

This book addresses the notion of time and temporality and its various conceptualizations in the theories of the new physics, utilized as a thematic and formal framework in the British novel of the twenty-first century. As the Newtonian conception of reality does not provide a reliable framework within which to situate human experience and generate meaning, fiction writers have recognized quantum mechanics as a potent source from which to draw in search of new metaphors. The quantum has become a part of the understanding of reality, and its concepts and assumptions have been absorbed into the textual structure and content of literary fiction. Shapes of Time in British Twenty-First Century Quantum Fiction examines human temporality as mediated by the timeshapes imagined within the context of the new physics, and explores the philosophical implications for human temporality and identity of situating an individual within the realm of physical time. Its chapters deal with various concepts of the new physics connected with temporality, and their appropriation in a selected novel: parallel universes in Andrew Crumey’s Sputnik Caledonia (2008), eternal recurrence and Poincaré’s theorem in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), chaos theory in Samantha Harvey’s The Wilderness (2009), and the end of time in Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y (2006). Each of them corresponds to a different conceptual shape of time: tree, concertina, spiral and snapshot, respectively, which is enacted on the formal level. Analyzing the new time constructs in a narrative, this book thus uncovers passages between scientific and humanistic standpoints, and reveals quantum fiction to be an effective tool for visualizing the subjective non-homogenous experience of private time.