What, Then, Is Time?

by Eva Brann

'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.

Genres: Philosophy

258 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Eva T. H. Brann was an American scholar, classicist, and the longest-serving tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. Born in Berlin in 1929 and later immigrating to the U.S., she earned degrees from Brooklyn College and Yale University. Brann devoted over six decades to teaching and writing, becoming a key figure in the Great Books tradition and serving as dean of St. John’s College.
Her wide-ranging works include Paradoxes of Education in a Republic, What, Then, Is Time?, and The Music of the Republic. She also co-translated several Platonic dialogues and received the National Humanities Medal in 2005. Brann passed away in 2024 at the age of 95, leaving behind a lasting legacy of intellectual rigor and philosophical inquiry.

Reviews

[for-much-deliberation ... · Rating 3 out of 5]

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...)