Guyau and the Idea of Time

Paperback. This volume revives a most remarkable essay by the French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau (1854-1888) on the genesis of our idea of Time. The original text, La Genèse de l'idée de temps, written in Guyau's widely acclaimed style, is accompanied here by its first translation into English, and by several chapters highlighting Guyau's thought and contemporary significance. Central to his argument is his thesis that time is an acquired organisation of representations enabling humans to store and remember past events. The cognitive functions or strategies that realize this organisation nearly always establish coherent episodes that are situated in concrete, spatially defined contexts. Such a position is remarkably consistent with modern cognitive views about knowledge representation and memory. Guyau is in fact so modern that readers may at times forget they are reading a century-old text.