Introduction

Abstract

It may seem odd that the introduction to a collection of essays should be longer than any of the essays themselves. Such need for excessive explanation might suggest a lack in the essays themselves or in the coherence and unity of purpose of the collection. Certainly, in the case of this book, there have been two major difficulties in bringing the collection together, both of which require some explanation and more than usual theoretical backgrounding of the essays. Nevertheless, throughout the process, there has been a central guiding argument to which the essays, however apparently disparate in style and content, all serve to make a contribution. This central argument is that time is not a given, natural, objective phenomenon, but a condition and product of processes of human activity. Corollary to this is the assumption that it is possible to access, write about and make descriptive, categorical and definitional statements about these processes. In short, it can be said that time temporalises, that it therefore emerges from prior ground and condition, that processes of temporalisation are somehow crucial to the way in which humans make worlds, and finally, that it is possible to say something about it.

But now the sight of day and night, and the months and the revolutions of the years, have created number, and have given us a conception of time, and the power of enquiring about the nature of the universe.

Plato, Timaeus