The time is now : essays on the philosophy of becoming

The ti me for what? The titl e of Mihaela Gligor's edited collection is wonderfully flexible, as anythinghaving to do with time should be. There is something not only boundless about time, but also raw and untamed. In it s pure form, ti me would be too much for us to handle. We would be crushed by the sheer immensity of it , or else we would lose our minds trying to make sense of such unmediated time. Luckily, for the most part we don't experience time in it s pure form. Time comes to us already processed:shaped, engineered, tamed. The volume does fi ne justice to the notion that we experience time asalready shaped by religion, politi cs, and culture. Whether it s contributions cover religious or political figures, philosophers or poets, mystics or physicists, they show - sometimes explicitl y, sometimes more discreetly - how difficult it is to deal with time in a pure, unmediated form. The contributors' cultural, religious, and intellectual rooting inform the way they think about ti me, just as about anything else. Which, far from being a weakness, is something to be recognized and celebrated. (Costica Bradatan, Te xas Te ch University, U.S.A.)