Ischia International Festival of Philosophy “Human Nature”, 23-30 September 2018 | Ischia, Italy
As human beings we struggle to understand time. Although we notice the passage of time constantly, it's difficult to put into words what actually is going on. We live in the present, but we also remember the past and we project ourselves into the future. We always perceive changes, but we never perceive time itself. We are surrounded by a lot of temporal things, but time itself seems to be something different. This is why our temporal language is full of metaphors (understood in a wide sense); they help us to grasp and to describe the rather abstract concept of time.
In my talk, I am going to analyse two types of temporal metaphors: On the one hand there are weak metaphors which appear frequently in everyday language and on the other hand we use strongly creative metaphors which are hard to understand. Weak or dead metaphors are interesting if we want to examine how we speak about structure of time, strong metaphors are interesting per se, they tell us how we perceive ourselves and society in a temporal universe.