What, Then, Is Time?

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'What is time?' Well-known philosopher and intellectual historian, Eva Brann mounts an inquiry into a subject universally agreed to be among the most familiar and the most strange of human experiences. Brann approaches questions of time through the study of ten famous texts by such thinkers as Plato, Augustine, Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, showing how they bring to light the perennial issues regarding time. She also offers her independent reflections. Examining the three phases of time, past, present, and future, she argues that neither external time nor the time of the human past is real: the one is a comparison of motions and the other a projection of memory. She concludes that true time is internal and has its origin in the imaginative structure of memory and expectation. Throughout her rich and original study, Brann never fudges the central fact that time is a mystery.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,1999

About the author

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Eva T. H. Brann was an American academician, dean and the longest-serving tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. She was a 2005 recipient of the National Humanities Medal.

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April 17,2025
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I have physically but not mentally completed this book. Though it is quite interesting I may not attempt to read it again. However, this text reminds us that time is a mystery and regardless of how in-depth we try to get in exploring it's varied phases (past, present, future) it is still a mystery, existing in the "imaginative structure of memory and expectation". It can be localised, viewed as motion, thought of as an image of eternity, considered as a number, etcetera, etcetera, all in all, time is a mystery, and that is the beginning and end of it...
(Many philosophers are referred to in this text such as Plato, Kant, Hegel, Newton, Einstein, Leibniz, etc, in time I will read them...)
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