History?

[Gray]

What is your theory of history? What is it based on?

[Hin-fung Fung]

Gray,
What means "theory of history"?

[Gray Kochhar-Lindgren]

Hi Hin-Fung,

How do you understand the meaning of your own past? How does that past shape the present, the future? I'm thinking of this because of Kant's thougts in "Cosmpolitanism," one of our readings for next week.

cheers,

Gray

[Gray]

How do you understand the meaning of your past? How does this relate
to the present, shape the future? Does your, and collective, history
have a "direction"? Is it teleological? Kant raises these issues in
"Cosmopolitanism".

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[Beisi]

Hi Gray~
When Kant says that time is "ordered", does he imply that

1. Such thing as time travel is impossible?

2. Everyone's time passes by at the same speed? (There is an old
Chinese story, about a man watched a chess match in a mountain, when
he went back home, he found that hundreds of years had already gone
by.)

[Gray Kochhar-Lindgren]

Hi Beisi:

 

Hmmm. Interesting questions!

 

1) I think he would think that time travel is impossible, since "time" is just succession: one thing after another in the empirical world and our inner sense of self--I am an identity through the changes of time that is "my" history.

 

2) No, empirically, sometimes time "flies" while at other times it "drags." We all can experience time differently, but we must--universal and necessary--experience the passing of time.

 

Any other thoughts about these questions floating around out there in Google Land?

 

Thanks for asking!

Gray