Time and Freedom

Christophe Boutons Time and Freedom addresses the problem of the relationship between time and freedom as a matter of practical philosophy, examining how the individual lives time and how her freedom is effective in time. Bouton first charts the history of modern philosophys reengagement with the Aristotelian debate about future contingents, beginning with Leibniz. While Kant, Husserl, and their followers would engage time through theories of knowledge, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Kierkegaard, and (later) Heidegger, Sartre, and Levinas applied a phenomenological and existential methodology to time, but faced a problem of the temporality of human freedom. Boutons is the first major work of its kind since Bergsons Time and Free Will (1889), and Boutons mystery of the future, in which the individual has freedom within the shifting bounds dictated by time, charts a new direction.