more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
It must not be claimed that anyone can sense time by itself apart from the movement of things or their restful immobility.
Gist of Idea
We can only sense time by means of movement, or its absence
Source
Lucretius (On the Nature of the Universe [c.60 BCE], I.465)
Book Ref
Lucretius: 'On the Nature of the Universe', ed/tr. Latham,Ronald [Penguin 1951], p.41
A Reaction
This seems a remarkably Einsteinian remark, though he is only talking of the epistemology of the matter, not the ontology. We are not far from the concept of space-time here.
| 314 | Heavenly movements gave us the idea of time, and caused us to inquire about the heavens [Plato] |
| 5103 | Time is not change, but requires change in our minds to be noticed [Aristotle] |
| 5698 | We can only sense time by means of movement, or its absence [Lucretius] |
| 5978 | I know what time is, until someone asks me to explain it [Augustine] |
| 2101 | If everything in the universe happened a year earlier, there would be no discernible difference [Leibniz] |
| 5535 | That times cannot be simultaneous is synthetic, so it is known by intuition, not analysis [Kant] |
| 5560 | The three modes of time are persistence, succession and simultaneity [Kant] |
| 8591 | There could be no time if nothing changed [McTaggart] |
| 21581 | We never experience times, but only succession of events [Russell] |
| 22993 | For abstractionists past times might still exist, althought their objects don't [Baron/Miller] |
| 23001 | The error theory of time's passage says it is either a misdescription or a false inference [Baron/Miller] |