Aristotle, Augustine and Ricœur’s Aporetics of Temporality in Context

Authors

  • Jonathan Martineau Liberal Arts College, Concordia University, Montréal, Canada.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/errs.2020.507

Keywords:

Aristotle, Augustine, Time, Ricœur, Time and Narrative

Abstract

Questioning Ricœur’s positioning of Aristotle and Augustine as the founders of the two mutually exclusive conceptions of time that dichotomize the Western tradition, this article suggests that what Ricœur describes as the aporetics of temporality is a product of the modern social time regime. Extracting Aristotle and Augustine’s conceptions of time from this modern problem reveals the Aristotelian so-called “naturalist” view of time as one that rather unifies humans and their world through symbolic mediation, while Augustine’s alleged “subjective” conception of time is read rather as expressing the subordination of time to divine transcendence.

Author Biography

Jonathan Martineau, Liberal Arts College, Concordia University, Montréal, Canada.

Author’s affiliation and contact info

Dr Jonathan Martineau

Assistant Professor

Liberal Arts College, Concordia University

2040 Mackay – RR-105

Montréal, Qc, H3G 1M8

+1-514-883-9511, jonathan.martineau@concordia.ca

 

Main areas of research

Time and temporality, political philosophy, history of philosophy, critical theory.

 

Main recent publications

Book

2015                 Martineau, J. Time, Capitalism and Alienation. A Socio-Historical Inquiry into the Making of Modern Time. Leiden: Brill.

French translation: Martineau, J. (2017). L’Ère du temps. Modernité capitaliste et aliénation temporelle, trans. by Colette St-Hilaire. Montréal: Lux.

 

Journal Articles

2020                Vers une phénoménologie des temps de loisirs à l’ère des algorithmes. Politique et Sociétés, accepted for publication, forthcoming.

2019                 with Kolinjivadi, V. & Almeida, D.V. Can the Planet be Saved in Time? On the Temporalities of Socionature, the Clock, and the Limits Debate. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. doi: 10.1177/2514848619891874

2017                Culture in the Age of Acceleration, Hypermodernity, and Globalized Temporalities.  Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, 47(4), 218-229.

2017                 Making Sense of the History of Clock-Time. Time and Society, 26(3), 305-320.

2017                Edmund Husserl’s Internal Time Consciousness and Modern Times, a Sociohistorical Interpretation. Journal of the Philosophy of History, doi: 10.1163/18722636-12341363.

 

Book Chapters

2017                Time in Modern Times: Heidegger’s and Bergson’s Conceptions of Time in Context. In E. Lung et al. (Eds.), Time and Culture (pp. 431-446). Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press.

References

References

Barbara Adam, Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).

Barbara Adam, Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).

Julia Annas, “Aristotle, Number and Time,” The Philosophical Quarterly 99 (1975).

Aristotle, Physics, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961).

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

David Bostock, “Introduction,” in Aristotle, Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe,” in The Brenner Debate, ed. T.H. Alston & C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Ursula Coope, Time for Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972).

Robert DiSalle, Understanding Space-Time. The Philosophical Development of Physics from Newton to Einstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996).

Yuval Dolev, Time and Realism (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2007).

Norbert Elias, Time. An Essay (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).

Robert Hannah, Time in Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 2009).

Robert Hassan, Empires of Speed: Time and the Acceleration of Politics and Society (Leiden: Brill, 2009).

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962).

Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectics (London: Verso, 2009).

David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).

Jacques Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen-âge, temps, travail et culture au Moyen-âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1977).

Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004).

John Polkinghorne, “The Nature of Time,” in On Space and Time, ed. Shahn Majid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit III (Paris: Seuil, 1985).

Massimiliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

Stavros Tombazos, Time in Marx. The Categories of Time in Marx’s Capital (Leiden: Brill, 2013);

Sarah Waterlow, “Aristotle’s Now,” The Philosophical Quarterly 135 (1984).

Neal Wood and Ellen Meiksins Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

Ellen Meiksins Wood, Citizens to Lords (London: Verso, 2008).

Ellen M. Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2012).

Downloads

Published

2021-03-17

Issue

Section

Articles