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This chapter examines Augustine’s discussion of time in Book 11. The contrast between eternity, in which there is no succession or change, and time, which is nothing but succession and change, is a crucial first step. Augustine uses this contrast to distinguish between ordinary utterances and God’s creative Word, the coeternal Son. Time is itself created, so there is no sense in asking what God was doing before he created, though Augustine’s understanding of the relationship between time and eternity raises difficult philosophical questions that Augustine himself does not address, though recent philosophers of religion have done so. Augustine appears to hold that only what is (temporally) present exists. The most contentious issue is whether Augustine holds a subjectivist theory of time, and if so, what exactly that theory is. After canvasing the merits of possible answers to that question, the chapter concludes that the most charitable reading is that Augustine “does not seem to offer an account of what time is but instead ‘merely’ offers an aporetic examination of certain puzzles concerning time and our experience of it.” This construal is "entirely in keeping with his frequently open-ended and exploratory manner of philosophical investigation.”
This chapter examines the intimate world of the family through an intergenerational lens. Education and work outside the home are understood by many women in Malaysia, as elsewhere, to have fundamentally altered the dynamics of conjugality. Variations in individual life courses, availability of resources, education and ethnic or religious backgrounds partly shape trajectories of life and marriage. Exploring continuity and change between generations, we see how marriage encapsulates both possibilities, enabling radical departures from conventional norms under the guise of conformity as well as the replication of past patterns. The binary of ‘arrangement’ versus ‘choice’ constitutes, simultaneously, a reference point and a misleading way to calibrate transformation – as anthropologists have shown for South Asia. Beyond this, marriages mark time, and are a means to tell and reflect upon family histories. Efforts to change the course of events or escape cycles of misfortune may be rare and difficult to achieve. Reflecting on differences and change across generations engages qualities of moral imagination, and is part of making history.
Alexandra Newton discusses the relation between virtue and habit in Kant’s moral philosophy. While commentators frequently claim that Kant rejects Aristotle’s definition of virtue as a type of habit, Newton argues that this overlooks the fact that Kant distinguishes different kinds of habit. While he rejects the idea that virtue is a habit of action or desire, like Aristotle he allows virtue to be a habit of choice (hexis prohairetike), understood as an exercise of practical reason. Carefully distinguishing the different notions of habit Kant delineates thus allows us to see that his conception of virtue is more Aristotelian than commonly assumed. At the same time, Newton notes, there remain important points on which Kant’s conception diverges from Aristotle’s, having to do specifically with the temporal character of virtue
The substantive discussion begun in Chapter 2, particularly on interpretation, is continued in Chapter 3 through the prism of progress. Collective understandings of state violence, including torture, are understood to have changed over time, with what was historically conceived as permissible coming to be condemned as reprehensible. Changing understandings of pain and punishment, it is argued, are sociopolitically contingent, with legal assessments of torture too beholden to this broader context. On this register, the chapter charts the broader contours of the central shifts in prevailing social and scientific views, values and knowledge, as channelled or challenged through judges and taken to constitute torture’s sociality. This has culminated, it is argued, in a script of ‘progress’ driving the anti-torture field.
Augustine's Confessions, written between AD 394 and 400, is an autobiographical work which outlines his youth and his conversion to Christianity. It is one of the great texts of Late Antiquity, the first Western Christian autobiography ever written, and it retains its fascination for philosophers, theologians, historians, and scholars of religious studies today. This Critical Guide engages with Augustine's creative appropriation of the work of his predecessors in theology generally, in metaphysics, and in philosophy as therapy for the soul, and reframes a much discussed - but still poorly understood - passage from the Confessions with respect to recent philosophy. The volume represents the best of contemporary scholarship on Augustine's Confessions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and builds on existing scholarship to develop new insights, explore underappreciated themes, and situate Augustine in the thought of his own day as well as ours.
The entangled relations of humanity’s natural and digital ecosystems are discussed in terms of the risk-uncertainty conundrum. The discussion focuses on global warming from the perspective of the small world of geoengineering, with a particular focus on geothermal energy, marine geoengineering, and the political economy of mitigation and adaptation (section 1). It inquires into the large world of the biosphere, Anthropocene, and uncertainties created by the overlay of human and geological time (section 2). And it scrutinizes the technosphere, consciousness, and language as humanity’s arguably most important cultural technology (section 3).
In this book, Ann Marie Yasin reveals the savvy and subtle ways in which Roman and late Roman patrons across the Mediterranean modulated connections to the past and expectations for the future through their material investments in old architecture. Then as now, reactivation and modification of previously built structures required direct engagement with issues of tradition and novelty, longevity and ephemerality, security and precarity – in short, with how time is perceived in the built environment. The book argues that Roman patrons and audiences were keenly sensitive to all of these issues. It traces spatial and decorative configurations of rebuilt structures, including temples and churches, civic and entertainment buildings, roads and aqueducts, as well as theways such projects were marked and celebrated through ritual and monumental text. In doing so, Yasin charts how local communities engaged with the time of their buildings at a material, experiential level over the course of the first six centuries CE.
After reviewing several stances in modern theology on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus, this article argues that a common feature of the worldviews of Baroque Catholicism, classical Reformation theology, and the Enlightenment, namely, their separation of the supernatural and natural realms into ‘two orders’, explains the attractiveness of the apologetical strategy of affirming the reality of the resurrection as a non-historical, supernatural event. Drawing on the temporal and spatial imaginary of Henri de Lubac’s theology of grace, it concludes by pressing the case for a theological understanding of the resurrection of Jesus as a historical event that valorises the eschatological resonance of time.
Today, there is a tendency within the field of environmental education to argue that the current global metacrisis is intrinsically linked to idealist traditions in philosophy and culture. The underlying intuition appears to be that idealism ultimately relies on a Cartesian distinction between mind and body: that it privileges the mind while neglecting the body, thereby enabling a view of materiality – or “nature” – as something to be used or exploited. A similar assumption can be identified in the call for papers for this issue, where modern idealism is linked to neoliberal politics and economics. In contrast, the aim of our paper is not to reject idealism entirely but to argue that the real issue lies in particular ideas and worldviews associated with specific understandings of reality. To open up space for alternative ideas and imaginaries, we propose that educational theory and practice must engage with a process we term mundification: the initiation of individuals – though education and other cultural practices – into what it means for there to be something at all, that is; a world.
Amidst a high-profile ecoclimate crisis, archaeology is rightly revisiting its relationship with ecology and seeking to orient its work towards pressing environmental concerns. Compelling proposals have been made for the potential of archaeological science to directly inform ecological problems and practices. We consider the strengths of and challenges for these scientific approaches here, alongside raising the prospect that archaeology can also harness less tangible analytical strengths – its expertise in human–landscape relationships (people in nature) and in landscape change (time) in attending to wider, but equally important, correlates of an ecological emergency.
The central component of Suárez’s account of time in DM 50.8-11 is the metaphysical notion of duration understood as permanence in existence and as belonging to every real being in its actual existence. Suárez associates different kinds of duration with the different modes of existence displayed by real beings. The mode of existence relevant to time is that of successive beings: time is the duration of successive things, that is, of change. Suárez’s ambitious project is to offer a “metaphysical deduction” of time from the notion of duration. In this paper I analyze two fundamental aspects of this project: the existence of time and its real identity with change. Suárez emphasizes that both the existence of time and its identity with change can be deduced from general properties of duration. However, he is also very much concerned to show that this deduction does not miss specific features of time.
History is not just a recounting of events; it is shaped by narrative style, cognitive frameworks, and the selection of time frames, all of which influence how events are understood. The chapter delves into the ‘linguistic turn’ in history, where language plays a crucial role in expressing and interpreting the past. Key elements of historical discourse, including narration, voice, time, and causation, are examined in depth.
The chapter also addresses the challenges of teaching history in a second language (L2), emphasizing the need for specialized instructional tools and rhetorical models. With references to a comprehensive chart of integrated descriptors for history across the curriculum and a genre map for bilingual history teaching, it underscores how controlling historical discourse through language can influence societies. Thus, this work also highlights the intersection of history, language, and ideology, especially in multilingual contexts.
We examine a monoidal structure on the category of polynomial functors, defined through the operation of substituting one polynomial into another. We explain how this composition product transforms polynomials into a richer algebraic structure, enabling the modeling of more complex interactions and processes. The chapter explores the properties of this monoidal structure, how it relates to existing constructions in category theory, and its implications for understanding time evolution and dynamical behavior. We also provide examples and visual representations to clarify how substitution works in practice.
This chapter addresses the phenomenon of incarcerated writers who self-identify as “state raised”: bound to state-sponsored spaces of involuntary confinement (including foster care, juvenile detention, jails, and prisons) from childhood. The chapter begins with Kenneth E. Hartman’s reading of the work of Jack Henry Abbott; its second half, by Doran Larson, addresses the work of Kenneth E. Hartman. The chapter presents writers for whom legal confinement has formed the majority of their lived experience and who thus bring uniquely troubled while familiar (verging on the familial) perspectives to the explication of and reflection on legal caging and the writing that emerges from it.
With their shallow reliefs, depictions of contorted movement, and a historically inflected formal style, first century BCE and CE Neo-Attic reliefs are distinct among Greek and Roman relief sculpture. Primarily made for an elite Roman audience, the reliefs invoke stylistic techniques from different periods of Greek art and creatively combine figural types taken from earlier objects. The scenes are also characterized by a sense of spacelessness, established by the representation of figures, objects, and landscapes in shallow relief and by the frequent distorted play with depth and space. By considering a select number of examples, this chapter argues that the reliefs’ formal elements work together to evoke multiple temporalities and spaces, so that the distinct time and space created by and in these reliefs allowed them to become powerful sites of contact. In connecting their audience with an idealized past that takes place in a generic space, the reliefs offered viewers the opportunity not only to engage visually with the past temporalities of Archaic and Classical Greece, but also to become immersed in them by sharing the same space as the stylized figures, who could slip from their timeless and spaceless background to the Roman world in which they were displayed.
In the First Analogy of Experience in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues, on the ground that it is needed for a united time, that everything in the world is (permanent) substance or a determination thereof. In this paper, I advance what I call a representational reading of this text, and I explain how it addresses two concerns. The first is that Kant’s argument should have no leverage to establish (permanent) substance in experience, since pure intuition already represents a ‘united’ time. The second is that even if Kant can establish the existence of (permanent) substance, he cannot prove that this substance is the substratum for everything else.
Over the past three decades, catatonia research has experienced a remarkable renaissance, driven by the application of diverse methodologies and conceptual frameworks. This renewed interest has significantly reshaped our understanding of catatonia, a complex syndrome with multifactorial origins spanning epidemiology, historical context, phenomenology, genetics, immunology, and neurobiology. These advancements have offered a more comprehensive and nuanced perspective, culminating in the recognition of catatonia as a distinct diagnosis in the ICD-11 – a landmark development that underscores its clinical and scientific relevance. Despite these strides, several unresolved issues remain that require future research. Bridging these gaps is crucial not only to enhance our understanding of catatonia but also to identify the most effective treatments and uncover the mechanisms underlying their efficacy. Such advancements hold the promise of developing improved diagnostic markers and tailored therapeutic strategies, offering significant benefits to patients affected by this challenging condition. In this chapter, we explore the profound implications of catatonia research, spanning its impact on clinical psychiatry and neuroscience, as well as its broader contributions to our understanding of the intricate relationship between the brain and mind.
The analysis of spatio-temporal data is critical for understanding change in ecological systems. Spatio-temporal methods are the natural extensions of spatial statistics incorporating change over time. This chapter covers spatio-temporal approaches such as join counts, scan statistics, cluster and polygon change and the analysis of movement, cyclic phenomena and synchrony. In all these applications, we must consider and account for multi-dimensional autocorrelation in the data.
This chapter begins by outlining Heidegger’s project of identifying the timeliness (Zeitlichkeit) of human existence as what is ontologically distinctive about it. The chapter also recounts how, in the context of establishing that distinctiveness, Heidegger demonstrates that timeliness to be the “original time,” that is, the origin of so-called “world-time” (Weltzeit) (the time of the workworld) and, via use of the clock, the origin of the purely serial time attributed to things on hand in nature. In the wake of this exposition and after flagging criticisms of Heidegger’s undertaking, the chapter examines Ernst Tugendhat’s influential criticism that Heidegger’s putative demonstration is invalid since it has recourse to serial time (“time in the normal sense”) and, hence, is viciously circular. The chapter ends with a sustained rebuttal of Tugendhat’s criticism.
Part of the fascination of Being and Time is that it seeks to weave together so many different strands of thought. But unsurprisingly, its readers also worry that such a work must subject itself to such strain that ultimately it itself must unravel. Key tensions are between the outlooks of three figures: Heidegger the pragmatist, Heidegger the existentialist, and Heidegger the philosopher of being. Seeing how openness to our concerns as a whole is both necessary for authenticity and reveals a unified horizon against which entities with different ways of being show themselves, dissipates these apparent tensions. Recognition of the mediating role played by a conception of the good – that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle and Augustine inspired – helps make clear that authenticity is both compatible with the practical embeddedness of our concerns and reveals a form of understanding necessary for ontology to be possible.