In Stage 5, the journey moves to meaning relations within sentences, introducing such topics of quantification (including generalized quantifiers), representing events and states, temporal, aspectual, and modal distinctions in semantics, and propositional attitude reports.

This chapter critically analyzes the work of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century white settler colonial writers who represented Indigenous characters and stories. It will examines how certain tropes persisted, from Rolf Boldrewood’s late romanticism to Eleanor Darks reconstructive modernism. It explores how novels by these writers manifest a contradictory set of ideas towards race and landscape, which it takes as emblematic of wider white Australian culture.

Jacobi’s influence on the founder of so-called existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard, has rarely been examined. This chapter explores Kierkegaard’s critical and somewhat polemical discussion of Jacobi’s notion of the “leap” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which not only shows that Kierkegaard was acquainted with Jacobi’s major work, Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza but how it shaped Kierkegaard’s own particular development of the salto mortale.

Drawing on literary works from the Revolutionary Wars (Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans and Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht), the First World War (Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues and Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern), the Second World War (Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster) and the recent Iraq War (Handke’s Yugoslavia essays and Jelinek’s Bambiland), this chapter argues that the perception of specific historical wars is marked by distinct configurations of time and historicity. Literary representations of the Revolutionary Wars tend to conceive of war within a gradual unfolding of national destiny. Depictions of the First World War chafe against linear concepts of time and against concepts of temporal homogeneity. Representations of the Second World War radically deconstruct concepts of linearity and teleology. Here, time is a web in which the past impinges on the present and the present impacts the future. Both Handke’s and Jelinek’s texts, finally, are characterized by a detachment or even alienation from time and space occasioned by the mediatization of warfare on television and the web.

This chapter builds upon feminist reinterpretations of Darwinian evolutionary theory to reconsider how the processes of variation, heritability, and natural selection do not preclude the possibility of thriving disabled life. Despite the cooptation of Darwinian thinking by later social Darwinists and eugenicists that led to the mass institutionalization and genocide of disabled people, I argue that Darwin’s scientific writings provide the unexpected foundations for a counter-eugenic reading of evolution in their conception of life as perpetually changing and thus open-ended. From the perspective of disability, the value of an organism’s adaptation and form cannot be predetermined by any static notion of fitness that presumes ablebodiedness as a prerequisite for viable life. By reading evolutionary temporality and Darwin’s own disabled lived experience through disability theory’s conception of crip time, I ultimately suggest that Darwinian evolution imagines disability not reductively as an evolutionary dead end but instead as the variable adaptation of human survival.

Chapter three theorizes unruly landscapes through the relations of polities, peoples, and shifting ecologies. It emphasizes the myriad ways in which human-environment relationships are forged relative to a given social and political order. Threaded within a critique of existing conceptions of the political geography of Iron Age Cyprus are arguments for taking seriously the dynamic resources, places and community boundaries, and temporalities of urban and rural terrains. The chapter utilizes claims drawn from rural studies, anthropology and political ecology, and history to investigate settlement hierarchies and resource control, territoriality, and social time.

As Darwin recollects and writes his experience of teeming variety in the Brazilian rainforest, he conflates the roles of descrying natural historian and person of aesthetic sensibility. Thinking and feeling under the influence of eighteenth-century theories of the sublime and beautiful, Darwin writes his way into a dynamic that confounds object and subject and destabilizes the chronology of looking. Beginning with Darwin’s pretheoretical working through of the temporality of aesthetic experience, particularly the aesthetic experience of variety, this chapter illuminates the ways that Darwin’s theorization of variation, as a scene of distributed agency, was entangled with the processes of experiencing, reading and writing about variety—and impacted by the anticipation and reality of being read. The temporality of this multifaceted experience anticipates Darwin’s later conclusions about the place of anticipation itself in evolutionary processes that hinge on aesthetic phenomenology.

I outline the theories of temporal awareness and existential temporality that Merleau-Ponty gets from Husserl and Heidegger and qualifies with his account of body temporality. This constitutes an efficacious past that inhabits the present without ever having been present to consciousness. I then set out his stories about the tacit and spoken cogito and about the concrete subject or person. I consider objections to the effect that his account of the embodied subject seems to cast it as an unceasing project of acquisitive appropriation, and that his view of the body is an idealisation from an ageist and ableist perspective. My response is that his story about appropriation is qualified for the most part, and that his theory can be reworked to escape the charges of idealisation, ageism and ableism. I conclude by suggesting that his notion of radical reflection brings out how phenomenology is of its essence revisable and its futures unforeseeable.

One of the primary goals of archaeology is to construct narratives of past human societies through the material evidence of their activities. Such narratives address how people led their lives and how they viewed and interacted with their world at different times in the past. However, the way archaeologists look at time is becoming increasingly disparate, fragmented and sometimes contradictory. While we now have more exact ways of dating past remains and deposits, and more sophisticated ways of examining how past humans may have engaged with their physical and social environments, there is some internal confusion as to the relative merits of alternative interpretations and evidence. In the research drive to determine a greater precision of dating and chronology, the effect that increased dating effort has on the accuracy of archaeological narratives has rarely been discussed. This chapter discusses the problems and opportunities for archaeological narratives in approaches to time.

This chapter examines the temporality around which international law is articulated, with an emphasis on the doctrine of international responsibility. The chapter specifically elaborates on how the doctrine of international responsibility suspends international law’s one-directional temporality and provides discursive devices that allow one to travel back and forth between the past of wrongfulness and the present of responsibility. Such two-directional temporality, the chapter argues, is at the service of the narrative function of international responsibility in that such two-way time travel allows a re-representation of the real produced by legal claims made under the doctrine of international responsibility. The chapter ends with concluding remarks on the distinction between the imaginary and the real.

Milton’s late poems suggest that the best way to represent the experience of modernity is to turn to and to reimagine the work of the Ancients—the modern paradox. This raises questions of periodization, and time. Milton is more “Renaissance” than “early modern,” at least in terms of how the early modern is usually understood, i.e., as a temporally delimited historical period after the medieval and before Enlightenment modernity. The Renaissance was modernizing in its appropriation of the Ancients. Milton’s late poems are obsessed with temporality—well, temporalities, plural, actually—since Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes narrate three different temporalities. Paradise Lost narrates the continual backwards and forwards of living in history—a present affected by the past, and by anticipatory imaginings of an as-yet unrealized future. Paradise Regained stays in the present, bringing readers along in a story that moves from a beginning to an end. In Samson Agonistes, Samson sees no future. The key subsequent literary development in verbally representing forms of modernity, the novel has a deep presentism which persists. Milton is received in a literary-critical tradition deeply affected by the novel’s focus on the present and on the synchronous life of the characters.

Telemann’s complex relationship with the musical past encompassed a healthy respect for the works of previous generations (Lully, Corelli, and others), ambivalence about “ancient” music that was marked by impoverished melodies and contrapuntal excesses, and disdain for Ancients who rejected whatever was new. This chapter addresses yet another perspective, of a composer at pains to bring outmoded musical idioms into a meaningful dialogue with more modern ones. Two works in particular, church cantatas that Telemann composed in Frankfurt am Main, demonstrate how such juxtapositions can serve as rhetorically powerful tools for communicating a theological message. Whereas Sehet an die Exempel der Alten (TVWV 1:1259) cleverly caricatures music of the mid-seventeenth century, the striking dialogue cantata Erhöre mich, wenn ich rufe (TVWV 1:459) casts a doubting, disconsolate Christian as a musical Ancient and the consoling Jesus as a Modern, an opposition vividly highlighted by text, musical style, and instrumentation. That Telemann’s reminiscences of the musical past are not cut of a purely nostalgic or ironic cloth but instead offer a productive dialogue with the musical present – one articulating an enlightened awareness of the divide between historical and present-day consciousnesses – may be read as evidence of the composer‘s extraordinary capacity for aesthetic and theological reflection.

An in-depth analysis of ageing can assist us in developing a deeper understanding of human temporality and its relevance for the good life. The experience of growing old makes clear that life is essentially a process in time with a particular temporal extension and structure that has important eudaemonic implications. Taking ageing as the starting point and frame of reference, I distinguish three ethically relevant levels of human temporality that become manifest in the process of ageing: the fundamental co-ordinates and parameters of human existence in time; the culturally variable models of the life course and life stages; and the unique individual trajectory through life and its narrative interpretation. These considerations underline the need for a more appropriate appreciation of the temporal dimension and structure of human existence in ethical discussions about the good life.

This chapter unpacks the dense statement that Kierkegaard gives of his ontology of the self at the start of The Sickness unto Death. It considers the claims that the self is a synthesis of factors that stand in tension with one another (the finite and the infinite, etc.); that it is not simply a relation but a dynamic, continuing process of relating to itself; that it is only able to be this because it relates to another (God); and that selfhood, so considered, is a goal which human beings fall short of attaining. Throughout, Kierkegaard’s thought is explicated by comparison and contrast with other philosophical accounts of the self, referring to Descartes, Locke, Fichte, Heidegger, Sartre and Frankfurt; and the continuing relevance of Kierkegaard’s account to recent discussions of selfhood, the relation of the self or person to the human being, and the extent to which the self can be thought of as self-constituted is emphasized.