Zeitbegriff

Zeitbegriff is a German term that translates roughly to the concept of time. In philosophy, it designates the way time is thought, experienced, or constituted, rather than simply measured by clocks. The expression is used to distinguish theoretical or ontological understandings of time from empirical or chrono-physical concepts.

Historically, discussions of time range from antiquity to modern philosophy. Early accounts treated time as a measure of change or succession and linked it to motion and calendrical cycles. Aristotle analyzed time as the number of change relative to before and after, while medieval and early modern thinkers debated whether time is an attribute of things or a feature of human perception and cognition.

In modern philosophy, the Zeitbegriff is closely associated with debates about the structure of time. Immanuel Kant argued that time is a pure form of sensible intuition, a necessary condition for experience rather than an attribute of things-in-themselves. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, figures such as Bergson emphasized durée, a lived, qualitative flow of time, contrasting with measurable clock time. The phenomenological tradition, especially Husserl’s analyses of inner time-consciousness, examined how retention, primal impression, and protention constitute temporal experience. Martin Heidegger extended the discussion in Being and Time, arguing that temporality is fundamental to being itself, shaping how Dasein understands its existence.

Today, the Zeitbegriff remains a central reference point in philosophy, cognitive science, and related disciplines, where it is used to compare subjective experience, theoretical models, and physical theories of time.