Introduction to the section on time

the conference on "'Time, Forward!': The Time of Philosophy and Philosophy of Time" was held in Saint Petersburg. The main goal of this conference was to offer a general methodology for cultural analysis of the Russian society in the first third of the twentieth century. As the main category of such an analysis, time was chosen, since the problematising of time served during this period as a leitmotif that penetrated and bound together all parts of the intellectual social whole. Indeed, in the twentieth century, the idea of and attitude toward time changed radically. This change was due to discoveries in physics (theory of relativity by Einstein), sociology (time as a factor of technological and cultural change), economics (time as a unit of measurement of aggregate labour costs for products), psychoanalysis (time as a structural model of personality), and the general atmosphere of social withdrawal including numerous political, economic and military crises, and permanent revaluation of traditional values. Time gained a new, personalised character and became the main form of historical and individual identity as well as a lens for interpreting the self and the world. Thus, time was transformed from an objective physical factor and a historical time into an existential phenomenon for human beings. This new approach to time can be characterised as a "temporal turn," the main idea of which is, as expressed in Sergey Askol'dov's words, that time "is inseparable from its content. Strictly speaking, it is not time that exists, but temporal being" (Askol'dov 1913, p. 147)

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