Corona infections, childhood memories, presidential elections, avalanches: everything we experience and witness and all external events can be ordered in time – according to their succession. Time is therefore an ordering parameter, or dimension, of events. There is disagreement about what else time is on the “battlefield of eternal disputes” – as Kant once called philosophy (or more precisely: metaphysics): Is time relative or absolute? Is it continuous or discrete? Is it a substance in its own right or is it constituted by relationships between events?

The Paper is available at the Loccumer Pelikan Website.


Loccumer Pelikan 1(24). 4-8.

Back to overview
diversity and plurality

“Join us to create more diversity and plurality in knowledge production.”

Gisela Febel
l’illusion d’une unité

“Foucault speaks of contradiction as l’illusion d’une unité.”

Ingo H. Warnke
coherence in thought

“The imperative of non-contradiction generally produces a coherence in thought that is often at odds with social complexities.”

Yan Suarsana
Bhabha on enlightenment and coloniality

“Homi Bhabha says about the contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment, claims to democracy and solidarity and simultaneous colonization and ongoing coloniality: ‘That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition.’”

Kerstin Knopf
sustained engagement

“The history of Western philosophy can be understood as a sustained engagement with contradiction.”

Norman Sieroka