Thinking time in the 20th century: a phenomenological perspective Not only in philosophical thought, but also in the broader field of Western culture in the first half of the 20th century (and especially in literature), the theme of time has been gaining increasing prominence. The focus of attention, however, is not primarily on so-called objective time, the time of clocks and calendars, but on time as it is experienced by the individual human being in his or her finite existence. A kind of foreshadowing of this interest in internal temporality is the Bergsonian notion of duration (durée) as a flowing continuum of heterogeneous qualities of states of consciousness (1889). Somewhat later, diverse strands of German and French existentialism emerge, whose defining feature is a rethinking of the very finitude of individual human life. Last but not least, the theme of time played a decisive role in phenomenology, a new (and since then probably the last) attempt to renew science or knowledge through a radical inquiry into its foundations. But if the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, was among the first to raise again the ancient Augustinian question "what is time?", then his followers (especially Martin Heidegger, but also, for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty) gave this question an ontological dimension and showed how closely the question of time is related to the question of who we are. Since more than one prominent phenomenological author has been inspired by Augustine's analysis of Book XI of the Confessions in his reflections on time (at least E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, and P. Ricoeur), we begin by reading this text. We will follow this with excerpts from classical texts that deal with the phenomenological analysis of time and temporality. Reading: Aurelius Augustinus, Confessions (XI,14,17-XI,28,38); Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (§§ 1,2; 7-19); Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, Part III, §§ 14-25.
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