授课教师：刘任翔
授课学期：2021秋、2022春
授课院校：OCAD University, Toronto, Canada
课程描述
What is time? When we raise this question, either in everyday life or in the sciences, we speak as if we were inquiring about a thing: about its definition, properties, etc. But is time reducible to a thing? With what things must we have already become familiar, so that we come to wonder what time is? What is the sense in which time “is”? These are difficult questions ever since the human being began to think; time has been the gem on the crown of philosophy. On the other hand, however, it seems that philosophy and science share a preference for the invariant and eternal over the mutant and ephemeral; their history is one in which the core issues of temporal experience are meticulously and systematically avoided or explained away. Thus, St. Augustine of Hippo once said, “What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were to explain it to one that should ask me, I do not know.”
Meanwhile, the way in which time is intimated (without becoming thoroughly intelligible) has been affecting the way in which we navigate our lives. This is especially clear in an age of acceleration, synchronization, procrastination, and distraction, when time affords managing, saving, wasting, sparing, spending, ‘killing’, skipping over, etc. Beneath the paradox of whether we control time or whether it dominates us, beneath the extrapolation of historical narrative into billions of years despite our mortality, beneath the eager expectation of a new day and the painful regret for an irreversible act—a primordial sense of ‘inhabiting’ time continues to transpire.
In this course, we will take an adventure into this primordial sense of time, with the help of both our everyday lived experience and previous efforts to theorize time. For this purpose, we need both to learn and to un-learn about time. We begin with a lived “enigma” of time as expressed in literary works (W2). Then, we take four weeks surveying the attempts to theorize time in Antiquity (W3), the Scientific Revolution (W4, W6), and the new physics of the 20th Century, relativity theory and quantum mechanics (W7). Our aim is not just to learn about these theories but more importantly to question what have motivated the efforts to theorize, what aspects of temporal experience are epitomized in the theories, and what aspects are left out, remaining incomprehensible.
Then, we will follow a couple of “humanist” philosophers to reflect upon some of the irreducible dimensions of the human being’s temporal existence. We will look at Bergson’s criticism of the “spatialization of time” in thinking (W8), and we will get to explore the full sense of the past (W9) and the future (W10), beyond the image of “points” on a chronology. With the help of these, we shall be able to see the temporal richness of ethical phenomena like vengeance, forgiveness, and promise (W11). Finally, we will summarize the primordial sense of time as that of Becoming—more precisely, time can be interpreted as the way in which the growth, decay, and unfolding of things take place (W12).
Upon taking this course, the student will acquire a comprehensive grasp of historical and prevalent ways of construing time; more importantly, they will have a chance to experiment with a rigorous thinking aimed at excavating, beneath sedimentations of everyday platitude, some profound assumptions we have been making about what time is and in what sense time “is”. Apart from a training in thinking and writing, this course also aims at “loosening” stereotypes about time and thus opening up a space for creative representations of time and temporal experience in art and design.
评估方式
- Participation (10%). May involve group work – TBA.
- Online discussion: post 3 questions about readings and 7 responses to others’ questions (30%).
Questions are due every Monday; Responses are due every Friday. - Mid-term essay: (30%).
Analysis of a work of art about how it expresses time. 1,000 words maximum. - Final exam (30%).
Select 3 from 5 essay questions on course content, 500 words maximum each.
Scheduled for 3 hours during the exam period.
讲授内容及文本
Week 1: Introduction
Week 2: The Enigma of Time
- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temp perdu), excerpt.
- Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad), excerpt.
- Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), excerpt.
Week 3: Theorizing Time: Antiquity
- Aristotle, Physics, Book IV, 10-14.
- St. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, Book XI, excerpt.
Week 4: Theorizing Time: The Scientific Revolution
- Sir Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of the Philosophy of Nature, Scholium to “Definitions”.
- Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “Time” (excerpt): A30-41/B46-58.
Week 5: Break
Week 6: The Scientific Revolution (cont.): What Is So Revolutionary?
- Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Chapter X (Absolute Space and Absolute Time: God’s Frame of Action); Chapter XI (The Work-Day God and the God of the Sabbath).
- G. M. Clemence, “Time Measurement for Scientific Use,” in The Voices of Time.
Week 7: Theorizing Time: Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics
- Steven Savitt, “Time in the Special Theory of Relativity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time.
- E. J. Zimmerman, “Time and Quantum Theory,” in The Voices of Time.
Week 8: Attack on the Spatialization of Time
- Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Chapter II (“The Multiplicity of Conscious States. The Idea of Duration”).
Week 9: Lived Time: Grasping the Past as Past
- Nicolas de Warren, Husserl and the Promise of Time, Chapter 4: “The retention of time past.”
- Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, excerpt.
Week 10: Lived Time: Radical Openness of the Future
- Claude Romano, Event and Time, Part 2, Section B: “The other guiding thread: time and change.”
- Claude Romano, There Is: The Event and the Finitude of Appearing, Chapter 2: “Possibility and Event.”
Week 11: Ethical Temporalization: Vengeance, Forgiveness, and Promise
- Paul Ricœur, “Justice and Vengeance.” In Reflections on the Just, 223-231.
- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, §33: “Irreversibility and the Power to Forgive”; §34: “Unpredictability and the Power of Promise.”
Week 12: Time as Becoming: Growth, Decay, and Unfolding of Things
- Walther Dürr, “Rhythm in Music: A Formal Scaffolding of Time,” in The Voices of Time.
- Hajime Nakamura, “Time in Indian and Japanese Thought,” in The Voices of Time.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, “There is no time in things”; “The perceptual synthesis is temporal.”
Week 13: Recapitulation
时间小组｜The Circle of Time 