Introduction
pp. 189-195
in: Flavia Santoianni (ed), The concept of time in early twentieth-century philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2016Abstract
Bergson, echoing Augustine, sustained that we “do not think of real time”, but rather live it inasmuch as “life transcends the intelligence”. In effect, there has been no significant thinker, from antiquity until our time, who has not made the treatment of the mystery of time an essential moment of their philosophizing. Take, for example, Parmenides and Zeno, who consider time “subjective semblance”, or Kant and German idealism who transfigure it into the “pure form of sensibility” or “intuition”; think of Democritus and Epicurious who degrade it to the level of an “accident of accidents”, until reaching the conventionalism of Mach where it becomes a “useless metaphysical concept”; take Plato, who transposes time as the “mobile image of eternity” and Aristotle who posits it as the “number of movement according to before and after”; or still yet, consider Leibniz who considers space and time as conceptual apparatuses that describe the interrelations between events, and Plotinus who...
