Tricks of Time: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur in Search of Time, Self, and Meaning

Notes

256 Notes Notes to Introduction 1. E. J. Craig, “Philosophy and Philosophies,” Philosophy 58, no. 224 (1983): 189–201. See the various remarks in Christopher Phillips, Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001). 2. Lev Shestov, In Job’s Balance, trans. Camilla Coventry and C. A. Macartney (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975), 207. 3. Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000). 4. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 114. 5. Simone Weil, Lectures in Philosophy, trans. H. Price (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1978), 197. 6. One could point out a plethora of literature on this topic. For the sake of brevity I cite one eloquent summary in Douglas Kellogg Wood, Men Against Time: Nicolas Berdyaev, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, C. G. Jung (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1982). 7. Such questions are the stock and trade of the time-question. See, for example , Jan Faye, Uwe Scheffler, and Max Urche, Perspectives on Time (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997). A classical summary of how philosophers have dealt with time is found in Eugene Freeman and Wilfrid Sellars, eds., Basic Issues in the Philosophy of Time (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1971) and more recently Philip Turetzky, Time (London: Routledge, 1998). Yet, for a review of how ubiquitous the problem of time can be in various fields of research see J. T. Fraser, ed., The Voices of Time: A Cooperative Survey of Man’s Views of Time as Expressed by the Sciences and by the Humanities (New York: George Braziller, 1966); J. T. Fraser, Time as Conflict: A Scientific and Humanistic Study (Basel: Birkhauser Verlag, 1978); and, G. J. Whitrow, Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 8. Renditions of the classical philosophical problem of human identity can be found in Brian Garrett, Personal Identity and Self-Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1998); Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne, Personal Identity (Oxford: Basil Notes to Pages 4–9 257 Blackwell, 1984); and H. D. Lewis, The Elusive Self (Philadelphia: The Westminister Press, 1982). 9. I do not mean to insinuate here that there is but “one true meaning” to existence or that existence needs any recourse to foundationalism. I will return to the question of meaning in the course of this introduction. 10. This term and line of critique is borrowed from the clear exposition of the problem found in Marya Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves (London: Cornell University Press, 1996). 11. As Shaun Gallagher writes with respect to temporal experience: “I want to suggest that no one theory, no one paradigm, not even a hermeneutically enlightened one, will ever be able to account fully for temporal experience.” See, The Inordinance of Time (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 179. 12. For a comprehensive review of McTaggart’s classical argument see Roger Teichmann, The Concept of Time (London: MacMillan Press, 1995). 13. Is Kant’s rationalist program hopelessly bifurcated owing to his unclear and obscure definition of time(s)? For various discussions see Eyal Chowers “The Marriage of Time and Identity: Kant, Benjamin and the Nation State,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 25, no. 3 (1999): 57–80; Amihud Gilead, “Teleological Time: A Variation on a Kantian Theme,” Review of Metaphysics 38 (1985): 529–62; Charles Sherover, “Time and Ethics: How is Morality Possible?,” in J. T. Fraser and N. Lawrence, eds., The Study of Time II (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1975), 216–30; Charles Sherover, Heidegger, Kant and Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). In a more contemporary example, Heidegger’s description of the three temporal ecstases with his emphasis on the future demands Dasein’s definition as a Being-towards-death. However, my point here is not to apply the dynamic configuration of time-self-meaning to every system but to make the argument that it exists and may well be applicable to every system that defines time in a particular fashion. 14. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1930), 137. 15. Vincent Descombes, Objects of All Sorts: A Philosophical Grammar (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 4–5. With Decombes, I do not wish to imply that these isolated developments or trends were successive or cogent in French philosophy as much as they represent...