Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Tallis in Wonderland

On Making and Keeping Appointments

Raymond Tallis introduces post-tensed time.

“We say a dog is afraid his master may beat him; not, he is afraid his master will beat him tomorrow.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

In The Genealogy of Morals (1887) Friedrich Nietzsche famously characterized man as ‘the promising animal’. By this he meant not a creature who showed promise but one capable of making, and sometimes keeping, promises. He felt this capacity drew on something deeper.

That deeper something was hinted at in an earlier work, his Thoughts Out of Season (1876) when he discusses ‘The Use and Abuses of History’.

…