Abstract
The failure of the dialectics of time and space has various origins:
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The confusion between time and event, e.g., the confusion between past time and past event.
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The non-rigorous use of language, e.g., questions like the duration of present time.
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The difficulty in understanding the difference between a phenomenon which belongs to physical reality, and the corresponding mental construct or concept, e.g., we measure changes instead of hours.
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The dichotomy between time and space, attempting to make time, space, and spacetime, physical realities.
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The countless metaphors in which time has an active role (dynamics of time, action of time, arrow of time), and in which space has a materiality.
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Notes
- 1.
Exercise of controversy. Cicero (106–43 BC): res controversa, controversial issue.
- 2.
From the Greek doxa: opinion and hétéros: different; opposite to orthodox; orthos: straight.
- 3.
The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty summarized Henri Bergson’s thinking: Time is therefore me, I am the duration that I grasp, it is in me that duration grasps itself ([9]: Ch. 7).
- 4.
Referring thus to the tos and fros of history.
- 5.
From the Greek kratos: power; kratophany: manifestation of a power.
- 6.
From Latin cauda: tail. In music, coda designates the end of a movement.
- 7.
“God” written with a capital letter, as in Petronius (Ch. 3, 16: CXIV) or Tacitus (Ch. 8, 8: Book III, Ch. VI, 2); their Gods were not inferior to ours.
- 8.
Including one painting in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.
- 9.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
- 10.
Pushkin Museum of Moscow.
- 11.
The Art Institute of Chicago.
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Dassonville, P.F. (2017). The Failure of Dialectics. In: The Invention of Time and Space. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46040-6_3
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