The Nature of Time

So what is “time”?
If nobody asks me,
I know it;
if I have to explain it to someone when they ask,
I don't know how to say it.

Augustinus, Bekenntnisse, Buch XI, Kapitel XIV.17

Many people who have thought about the phenomenon of time must have felt the same way as Augustine. After all, his quote adorns many publications on the subject! We are used to dealing with time in everyday life, but as soon as we start thinking about time for a longer period of time, we realize that the various patterns of interpretation do not really fit with the views of common sense. This may be one reason why many thinkers have declassified the everyday experience of time as an illusion, a subjectively distorted perception of an objective fact. In the history of philosophy, the Eleatic school, which denied the reality of time with reference to Zeno's paradoxes of motion, was particularly effective.

Based on everyday experience, the attached article "Vom Wesen der Zeit" asks which essential features of the phenomenon of "time" are captured by the various concepts of time and which are not. In particular, the physical concept of time is critically examined. Finally, a concept of time is presented that takes the views of everyday understanding seriously rather than ignoring them.

Recommendations for reading:

• Stephen W. Hawking: Eine kurze Geschichte der Zeit, Rowohlt 1991
• Immanuel Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft, hrsg. von Raymund Schmidt, Meiner 1926
• Rudolf Kippenhahn: Im Anfang war die Zeit, in: Sterne und Weltall, Special 5 1999
• Robert Levine: Eine Landkarte der Zeit, Piper 1998
• Peter Mittelstaedt: Der Zeitbegriff in der Physik, Bibliographisches Institut 1980
• Mc Taggart: The unreality of time, Mind, 17 (1908), S. 457
• Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker: Zeit und Wissen, dtv 1995
• G. J. Whitrow: The Nature of Time, Penguin Books 1972