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Our struggle through history to understand time.by David Anderson, Ph.D. (an excerpt from the video
documentary "Time Travel:
Journey's into Time")
In the 8th Century B.C. - Homer conceptualized time in his great works. Most ancient civilizations believed that time was cyclic... that it had regular cycles. They believed this because everything around them in nature showed a kind of resurrection and repeatability... like the rising and falling of the ocean tides and rivers, the return of the seasons, and the cycles of the heavens. All of these supported this belief. But the greatest efforts to study, understand and define exactly "what time is"... began with the great philosophers of ancient Greece.
Later... Aristotle, in the 4th century BC, described time physically as the number or measure of motion, Plotinus, in the 3rd century, treated time metaphysically as the productive life of the soul, and And then St. Augustine, in the 4th century, who treated
time in a very new way... psychologically... as an illusionary product of our
mind. St. Augustine's view is still a very popular and provocative subject today.
We have been searching for centuries... but finding a true definition of time continues to escape us... even to this day. So... this leads to a very important question: Does time really exist? |
Fifteen
Millenia before the Greeks - Paleolithic Man was expressing the passing of time
in his cave art.
Some
of the most commonly accepted and studied views of time in philosophy were
presented by:
Plato,
in the 5th century BC, who treated time metaphorically as the moving image of
eternity.
Could
it be... that St. Augustine is correct?