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This interdisciplinary book focuses on Charles Darwin’s extensively detailed observations of all forms of animate life across the global world—humans included. These existential realities of Nature are not commonly recognized in today’s world, yet they are all of sizable import in impacting both flora and fauna, thus in human understandings of the nature of the world and the nature of all forms of animate life. Darwin’s descriptively anchored observations furthermore tie in directly with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of experience. However different their inquiries and wonder at the world and at human experience, their analyses show how descriptive foundations and a concern with origins are integral to both, and how methodology and a living dynamics are central to a recognition of the complementarity of biological-neurological sciences and phenomenology.
This interdisciplinary book focuses on Charles Darwin’s extensively detailed observations of all forms of animate life across the global world—humans included. These existential realities of Nature are not commonly recognized in today’s world, yet they are all of sizable import in impacting both flora and fauna, thus in human understandings of the nature of the world and the nature of all forms of animate life. Darwin’s descriptively anchored observations furthermore tie in directly with Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of experience. However different their inquiries and wonder at the world and at human experience, their analyses show how descriptive foundations and a concern with origins are integral to both, and how methodology and a living dynamics are central to a recognition of the complementarity of biological-neurological sciences and phenomenology.
Abstract
This essay provides a poetic picture of the author’s experience of the International Society for the Study of Time, of which he has been a member since the 1970s. It includes excerpts from the author’s poetry, including from “Turn Again,” an unpublished work of “semantic autobiography” that charts the process by which the meanings of words emerge and deepen over a lifetime. The word “Time,” especially as characterized by the founder of the Society, J. T. Fraser, is the central actor in the Society’s social and intellectual drama.
In:
KronoScope
Abstract
This paper tracks the intersection of three disciplinary areas: J. T. Fraser’s theory of time as nested temporalities, M. A. K. Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics, and English literary history. Narrative theorists claim that narrative is a use of language that organizes the human understanding of time. However, narrative is not limited to only one temporality but can include the multiple temporalities that appear in Fraser’s model. This approach repudiates studies of narrative, such as those in the structuralist tradition of dual discourse and story, which assume “time” has a singular meaning equivalent to Fraser’s “biotemporality.” Each temporality can be associated with a different type of coherent story, and thus the one narrative can weave together stories with different temporalities, its “temporal texture.” Fraser and Halliday both recognize Gerald Edelman’s dual model of the brain and the emergence of language through the evolution of the human brain from “primary consciousness” to “higher-order consciousness.” Language evolves in the “human umwelt” of everyday experience of material, mental and social worlds in the gravitational context of this earth. Thus pre-twentieth century narratives, with various textures, tell stories of Fraser’s temporalities of human earthly experience. Fraser’s model also describes the “unearthly temporalities” that, from the twentieth century, modern science and technology have added to human understanding, producing what he calls the “extended human umwelt.” The twentieth century narratives of modernism and postmodernism may include these temporalities in their texture. However, the digital culture of the twenty-first century already reshapes the human umwelt; the paper ends with some speculation on changes in organization of temporal meaning in the evolving context.
In:
KronoScope
Abstract
Hope informs and inspires our actions. We look to succeed at achieving what we hope for, and this orients our hope towards the future in which time is conceived linearly. The connection between hope as success and linear time creates several difficulties when we seek to defend our hope. This is especially the case regarding past hopes and the dead, who can no longer hope for themselves. J. T. Fraser’s hierarchical theory of time’s conflicts is a complex theory of time that makes possible thinking through hope more critically.
In:
KronoScope