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  There are few things that are as integral to the human experience as time. But how can we understand time itself? Truls Wyller ventures to answer this question by looking at philosophy, science, religion, literature and human psychology. It is clear that time can be defined in spectacularly different ways, from the most rigorous (time as the fourth dimension in Einstein’s general theory of relativity) to the most abstract (time as a literary construct in the retelling of a story). Interestingly, the author uses the concept of ‘now’ to demonstrate the relational nature of time to humans, which, in a very real way, sets human and scientific time apart.

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  Nature Astronomy

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  Wyller wades back into the thicket with What Is Time? . . . The question remains a conundrum to the unaided intellect and too big for any one discipline to monopolize it. Wyller, a professor emeritus of philosophy and religious studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, naturally gives a tip of the hat to Augustine, though the majority of his references are to scientists, philosophers, and the occasional literary figure from the last two or three centuries. Wyller offers a popular exposition rather than his own solution, but the ideas presented cluster and overlap, forming layers, and the author's role is to point out where they might be converging. He takes as his point of departure the distinction between human, subjective or experiential time, on the one hand, and physical, objective or experience-neutral time, on the other. They may or may not have anything to do with one another. (Therein lies the enigma.) And the categories are so broad that a range of ideas have taken shape in the effort to comprehend each of them. . . . A graceful overview.

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  Inside Higher Ed

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  With this erudite yet very accessible book, Truls Wyller tackles the most central question in the study of time: How do we reconcile the time of physics with time as we experience it? His answer – drawing on history, philosophy, science, and literature – is that time is constituted by consciousness itself. Delightful, synoptic, and laudably interdisciplinary.

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  Adrian Bardon, Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and author of A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time

Introduction: Which Time?

1 The Clock and its Past: On Traditional and Modern Time Conceptions
2 Physics Time: Einstein
3 Philosophy’s Time: Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger
4 Recurrence Time in Life, Religion, History and Literature
5 Is There Any Time out There?
6 The Human Now

References
Further Reading
Index

Truls Wyller (Author)
Truls Wyller is Professor Emeritus at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. He is the author of many books including Objectivity and Self-Consciousness (2000) and The Size of Things: An Essay on Space and Time (2010).