Beiheft 6
+ A. D. MOMIGLIANO, Time in Ancient Historiography, History and Theory 5 (1966), Bei. 6, 1-23.
The view widely accepted among theologians that Greeks and Hebrews held different conceptions of time is based upon the absence in Hebrew of a future tense and a specific word for time, and upon the claim that the Greeks conceived time as a cycle, the Hebrews as a line. None of these alleged evidences can survive examination. Moreover, whatever Greek philosophers thought about cyclical time, that view cannot be found in the historians. The real differences between Old Testament and Greek historiography lie in differing attitudes toward the continuity of events, kinds of evidence, the significance of remembering the past, and the relation of history and prophecy.
+ CHESTER G. STARR, Historical and Philosophical Time, History and Theory 5 (1966), Bei. 6, 24-35.
Every historian has some attitude toward the speed and direction of human development, and this is the historian's concept of time. Historians should not be seduced by abstract chronology into assuming that time flows evenly; their task is to discern the swiftness or slowness, the advance or retrogression of the movement of events. The alleged difference between the "unhistorical" Greek conception of cyclical time and the "historical" Christian conception of linear time is not supported by the evidence from Greek and Christian historiography; it reflects a confusion between what philosophers have said about time and what historians in all ages have meant.
+ ELIZABETH L. EISENSTEIN, Cho and Chronos: Some Aspects of History-Book Time, History and Theory 5 (1966), Bei. 6, 36-64.
Uncertainties about the relation of the present to the past reflect our inability to order coherently the accelerating accumulation of information about the past within a conception of temporal development which originated with the permanence of printed books and records. The orally transmitted memory of events was achronic; succeeding scribal culture, aware of the decay and loss of manuscripts, correspondingly believed in historical decline and in catastrophic and cyclical theories of historical change. The appearance of printed books and records gave rise to uniform time scales, transformed the sense of temporal location, fostered belief in the straight-line direction of history leading to the revolution of the "Present," but also has concealed from historians the extent to which their conceptions and problems reflect a cumulative print-made culture.
+ SIEGFRIED KRACAUER, Time and History, History and Theory 5 (1966), Bei. 6, 65-78.
The conception of chronological time as a homogeneous medium comprising all events underlies the Western idea of history; but what George Kubler suggests in The Shapes of Time of art works is true of an events: they are better understood by their positions in specific sequences than by their dates in chronological time. General. histories deceptively attribute significance to the chronology of events in different areas; yet, as Burckhardt showed, in some periods the shapes of time in different areas do coalesce. An antinomy of time is revealed: chronological time is superseded by unrelated bundles of sequences, but at the same time retains significance in their confiuence. Attempts to solve this dialectical problem of time (Croce, Proust) have failed; the problem is insoluble before the end of time.