Time's mysteries seem to resist comprehension and what remains,
once the familiar metaphors are stripped away, can stretch even the
most profound philosopher. In Of Time and Lamentation, Raymond
Tallis rises to this challenge and explores the nature and meaning
of time and how best to understand it. The culmination of some
twenty years of thinking, writing and wondering about (and within)
time, it is a bold, original and thought-provoking work. With
characteristic fearlessness, Tallis seeks to reclaim time from the
jaws of physics. For most of us, time is composed of mornings,
afternoons and evenings and expressed in hurry, hope, longing,
waiting, enduring, planning, joyful expectation and grief. Thinking
about it is to meditate on our own mortality. Yet, physics has
little or nothing to say about this time, the time as it is lived.
The story told by caesium clocks, quantum theory and Lorentz
coordinates, Tallis argues, needs to be supplemented by one of moss
on rocks, tears on faces and the long narratives of our human
journey. Our temporal lives deserve a richer attention than is
afforded by the equations of mathematical physics. The first part
of the book, "Killing Time" is a formidable critique of the
spatialized and mathematized account of time arising from physical
science. The passage of time, the direction of time and time travel
are critically examined and the relationship between mathematics
and reality, and the nature of the observer, are explored. Part 2,
"Human Time" examines tensed time, the reality of time as it is
lived: what we mean by "now", how we make sense of past and future
events, and the idea of eternity. With the scientistic reduction of
time set aside and lived time reaffirmed, Tallis digs deeper into
the nature of time itself in the final part, "Finding Time".
Questions about "the stuff" of time such as instants and intervals
about time and change, and the relationship between objective and
subjective time, open on to wider discussions about time and
causation, the irruption of subjectivity and intentionality into a
material universe, and the relationship between time and freedom.
For anyone who has puzzled over the nature of becoming, wondered
whether time is inseparable from change, whether time is punctuate
or continuous, or even whether time, itself, is real, Of Time and
Lamentation will provoke and entertain. Those, like Tallis himself,
who seek to find a place at which the scientific and humanistic
views of humanity can be reconciled, will celebrate his placing of
human consciousness at the heart of time, and his showing that we
are "more than cogs in the universal clock, forced to collaborate
with the very progress that pushes us towards our own midnight".
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