Are We in Time? : And Other Essays on Time and Temporality

The summa of a distinguished philosopher's career, and full treatment of the temporal in philosophical terms, this volume shows us that by taking time seriously we can discover something essential to almost every question of human concern. Are we IN time? Charles Sherover asks, and in pursuing this question he considers time in conjunction with cognition, morality, action, physical nature, being, God, freedom, and politics. His essays, while drawing upon Royce, Heidegger, Kant, Leibniz, and even Hartshorne and Bergson, defy categorization by method or school; instead, they reveal the diversity and divergence of thinking about time as well as the myriad features and values within the omnipresence of time and change. The volume begins with an overview of the history of thought on time and a clarification of some fundamental conceptual distinctions in temporal ideas. Sherover then offers a critique of Kant, the first thinker to recognize that all human experience has a temporal form. In a series of essays on metaphysics--a valuable corrective to the dominant metaphysical tradition of talking about being as if time does not matter--he pursues temporal responses to such problems as being, internal relations, individuation, mind, and free will. Finally, in essays on time, freedom, and the common good, Sherover argues that these three phenomena are intrinsically related to one another, the fulfillment of each involving the other two. Throughout, these essays brilliantly depict human life and thought thoroughly steeped in time and argue for the significance of the future for human activity. Portraying the openness of the future as the basis for purposiveness and freedom, knowledge and moral action, social life and religious hope, Sherover's work conveys a hopeful message of human finitude that nonetheless allows us a measure of control over events in our own time.

Charles M. Sherover is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Hunter College. He is the author/editor of The Human Experience of Time (Northwestern, 2001), and the author of Heidegger, Kant, and Time (Indiana, 1971) and Time, Freedom, and the Common Good (SUNY, 1989). He has also translated Rousseau's Social Contract (Harper & Row, 1984). Sherover was recently given the 2002 Josiah Royce Award by the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy.
Gregory R. Johnson received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He currently teaches in the Swedenborgian House of Studies at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.