Time, Continuity, and Indeterminacy: A Pragmatic Engagement With Contemporary Perspectives

Focusing on the issue of temporality, this book explores the assumptions guiding the frameworks of philosophers who have shaped the contours of the contemporary philosophical landscape, including Whitehead, Weiss, Derrida, McTaggart, and Heidegger. In the process, it remaps the terrain, often finding similarities where differences -- some quite radical -- are generally accepted, and finding differences where similarities are generally accepted. Rosenthal exposes the pragmatic perspective of temporality involving a radical rethinking of traditional ways of understanding and interrelating the key issues of time -- discreteness and continuity; fixity and indeterminacy; potentiality, actuality, and possibility; past, present, and future.

Sandra B. Rosenthal is Provost Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University.