ABSTRACT
Since Edmund Augustine's heady meditation on time in the Confessions, the subject of temporal existence has been central to speculation on the nature of history. Augustine's recognition of the temporal constraints on consciousness has never grown out-of-date. Husserl's investigations in his lectures on the structure of internal time-consciousness echo Augustine's insights and most likely provided impetus, as well as terms and concepts, for Heidegger's ruminations on the temporal character of Dasein. Giambattitista Vico had been imported into nineteenth-century Germany, as Isaiah Berlin recounts, but his importation came after both Herder's and Johann Goethe's original views on the historical world. Vico's repudiation of the Cartesian world view, and Karl Marx's critique of Hegelianism, compel them both to question the validity of system building on the basis of a conceptually derived first principle. Heidegger's analysis of time-consciousness brings us full circle to Augustine's perspective on time.
