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St. Augustine and the Paradox of Reflection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Roger McLure
Roger McLure
Affiliation:
University of Keele
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Extract

Notoriously, problems about time proliferate the moment we reflect on time-consciousness, or look for conceptual consistency between our ordinary temporal locutions. But it matters that reflection and language might be cited as alternative sources of this perplexity; for it is a sound principle of philosophical reasoning that answers to problems must, on pain of missing the point, be given in the same context as that in which they arise. If, for example, logicolinguistic analysis showed the notion of tense to be self-contradictory, as McTaggart claimed, it would be an act of scientific imperialism to lay it down that the fact that a favoured interpretation of time in relativity physics dispenses with tense means that there is no real problem.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 69 , Issue 269 , July 1994 , pp. 317 - 326
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1994

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References

1 Confessions, (Oxford: World′s Classics, Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 230Google ScholarFor Wittgenstein's treatment of the Augustinian predicament see his Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), p. 79, section 196.Google ScholarThe Blue and Brown Books (Basil Blackwell, 1975), pp. 108–109. For endorsements and developments of his line of criticismGoogle Scholarsee R., Suter, ‘Augustine on Time with Some Criticisms from Wittgenstein’, Revue Internationale de Philosophic, 1961–;1962, pp. 387–389;Google Scholar also R., Gale, The Language of Time (London & Melbourne: Humanities Press, 1968), p. 5, where further relevant literature is cited.Google Scholar

2 Ideen 1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), p. 86.Google Scholar

3 op. cit. p. 85.Google Scholar

4 Eloge de la Philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 246. Arguably Merleau-Ponty is here indulging his well-documented habit of reading his own views back into Husserl, especially with respect to his implication that Husserlian reflection encounters the Augustinian problem of non-presence. This is not the place for me to take up such matters. Suffice to say that with or without support from Husserl, the Augustinian/Merleau-Pontyan view of reflection stands on its own merits.Google Scholar

5 La Phenomenologie de la Perception, Paris: Gallimard, 1945, ix.Google Scholar