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Time is what is measured by clocks. It regulates our everyday lives. It is what we never have enough of—unless we are bored, in which case we have too much of it. It includes past, present, and future, to which we have some access through memory, history, perception, and anticipation. This much everyone would concede about time, and this is probably about as much as most people would concede about it, not because there is no more to time but because in ordinary life we are absorbed in the things and events in time and give scant attention to time itself. One of the things that phenomenology aims to do is to disclose what has been there all along in our experience but that we have ignored or taken for granted. This is precisely what phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty have done in the case of time and our awareness of it. They have given us new philosophical eyes with which to see the phenomenon of temporality, which turns out to be far richer, broader, and more complex than everyday experience would lead us to believe. Indeed, our ordinary notions of time scarcely scratch its surface. The essays comprising this volume venture beneath that surface, continuing the rich tradition of phenomenological reflection on time. The collection's title, "The Many Faces of Time," then, does not signal yet another review of the old familiar faces. On the contrary, the strength of these essays is that they challenge, expand, and deepen the phenomenological tradition. They sharpen our vision of time and take it in new directions.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-9411-0_1

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