Impossibility of Time, The: Hegel and the Antinomies of Pure Reason
Author(s): James Sares (Author)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication Date: June 11, 2026
Language: English
Print length: 282 pages
ISBN-10: 1350551228
ISBN-13: 9781350551220
Book Description
Time raises certain irresolvable contradictions: the question of its absolute beginning leads us into the paradox of infinite regress versus a ‘time before time’, and to conceive of the temporal present as either an extension or a simple point fails to explain how time passes now. In this book, James Sares demonstrates – via his readings of Kant and Hegel – the impossibility of time’s robust passage. Sares’ approach is both exegetical and critical, developing textual analyses of Kant and Hegel’s respective claims concerning the antinomies of time while challenging and extending their work in conversation with contemporary debates in metaphysics and the philosophy of time. Drawing on Hegel’s logic, he rebuts Kant’s suggestion that the arguments of his antinomies do not apply to time because of its status as appearance. Yet Hegel, for Sares, fails to clearly articulate the irresolvability of the antimonies or their metaphysical significance. Sares returns to Kant, contra Hegel, to argue for the importance of the antinomies as problems for the very possibility of worldly existence, even for the rational closure of Hegel’s logical system. By showing how time’s robust passage cannot be rationally explained, this work constitutes a novel contribution to the scholarship on Kant, Hegel, and the philosophy of time.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“With this book, Sares offers an original look at Kant’s antinomies and thus at the structures of logic and reason. He provides not only a detailed investigation of the problem of time but an extended meditation on irresolvability as a philosophical virtue. Working with Hegel, a philosopher now notorious for claiming a completed system, Sares finds the greatest resources in the dialectic to be those that open up rather than those that close.” ―Andrew Alexander Davis, Professor of Philosophy, Belmont University NA, USA
“The Impossibility of Time takes us on a provocative journey that runs through Kant and Hegel’s views of the metaphysical contradictions at the heart of both the concept and the reality of time. Opening up a novel phenomenological perspective, the book draws conclusions that these authors did not dare to.” ―Angelica Nuzzo, Professor of Philosophy, Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, CUNY, USA
About the Author
James Sares is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky, USA.
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