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Tallis in Wonderland

On Making and Keeping Appointments

Raymond Tallis introduces post-tensed time.

“We say a dog is afraid his master may beat him; not, he is afraid his master will beat him tomorrow.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

In The Genealogy of Morals (1887) Friedrich Nietzsche famously characterized man as ‘the promising animal’. By this he meant not a creature who showed promise but one capable of making, and sometimes keeping, promises. He felt this capacity drew on something deeper.

That deeper something was hinted at in an earlier work, his Thoughts Out of Season (1876) when he discusses ‘The Use and Abuses of History’.

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