The Structure of Time: Language, meaning and temporal cognition

摘要

Time has always been attractive. There is evidence that the greatest minds, like Pythagoras, Heraclites, Epicharmus, thought and spoke of it since at least the Antiquity. The idea of temporal continuity (according to Epicurus) that changes the whole world (according to Lucretius) was conceived a long time ago. Although Albert Einstein once emphasized that there is hardly any division of a four-dimensional continuum into a three-dimensional spatial and one-dimensional temporal one (Einstein, 1923, p. 35), specialists in different fields still subdivide our four dimensions and single out time for the purposes of their studies, and quite often argue that the notion in question expresses 'the duration of being and a sequence [...] of all material systems [...] in the world' (Philosophy encyclopaedic dictionary, 1983, p. 157).