Modern Phenomenology I

Abstract

The chapter argues that the regime of elastic motion rises to historical dominance during the modern period—around the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The rise of this new kinetic regime occurred alongside the rising predominance of a new ontological description of being as fundamentally temporal: phenomenology. During this period one of the most historically marginalized concepts of Western ontology, time, became the most fundamental description of all reality. Of course, all the other major ontological descriptions of space, eternity, and force persisted in various ways, especially during the transitional seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but by the end of the eighteenth century all these other names had become increasingly reinterpreted temporally.