From Robert Grosseteste to Jean-François Lyotard, Augustine’s suggestion that time is a “dilation of the soul” (distentio animi) has been taken up as a seminal and controversial time-concept, yet in The Space of Time, David van Dusen argues that this ‘dilation’ has been fundamentally misinterpreted.Time in Confessions XI is a dilation of the senses—in beasts, as in humans. And Augustine’s time-concept in Confessions XI is not Platonic—but in schematic terms, Epicurean.Identifying new influences on the Confessions—from Aristoxenus to Lucretius—while keeping Augustine’s phenomenological interpreters in view, The Space of Time is a path-breaking work on Confessions X to XII and a ranging contribution to the history of the concept of time.

From Robert Grosseteste to Jean-François Lyotard, Augustine’s suggestion that time is a “dilation of the soul” (distentio animi) has been taken up as a seminal and controversial time-concept, yet in The Space of Time, David van Dusen argues that this ‘dilation’ has been fundamentally misinterpreted.Time in Confessions XI is a dilation of the senses—in beasts, as in humans. And Augustine’s time-concept in Confessions XI is not Platonic—but in schematic terms, Epicurean.Identifying new influences on the Confessions—from Aristoxenus to Lucretius—while keeping Augustine’s phenomenological interpreters in view, The Space of Time is a path-breaking work on Confessions X to XII and a ranging contribution to the history of the concept of time.