The Impossibility of Time: Hegel and the Antinomies of Pure Reason

Time raises certain irresolvable contradictions: the question of its absolute beginning leads us into the paradox of infinite regress versus a 'time before time', and to conceive of the temporal present as either an extension or a simple point fails to explain how time passes now. In this book, James Sares demonstrates - via his readings of Kant and Hegel - the impossibility of time’s robust passage. Sares' approach is both exegetical and critical, developing textual analyses of Kant and Hegel's respective claims concerning the antinomies of time while challenging and extending their work in conversation with contemporary debates in metaphysics and the philosophy of time. Drawing on Hegel’s logic, he rebuts Kant's suggestion that the arguments of his antinomies do not apply to time because of its status as appearance. Yet Hegel, for Sares, fails to clearly articulate the irresolvability of the antimonies or their metaphysical significance. Sares returns to Kant, contra Hegel, to argue for the importance of the antinomies as problems for the very possibility of worldly existence, even for the rational closure of Hegel’s logical system. By showing how time’s robust passage cannot be rationally explained, this work constitutes a novel contribution to the scholarship on Kant, Hegel, and the philosophy of time.

ISBN-13: 9781350551220