Introduction to ten essays commissioned by Ben Eltham
As Suzanne Guerlac notes in 'Thinking in Time', her acclaimed 2006 book on the philosophy of Henri Bergson, 'time is an age-old question that has become a pre-eminently modern problem.' We need not believe, as many followers of Christian religions do, that we live in 'end times' to agree that time is not quite what it used to be. The modern world, in fact, seems to be constantly getting 'faster', as the science journalist James Gleick observed in his 1999 book of the same name. Writing from a different tradition, philosopher Paul Virilio has analysed post-modernity as a crisis of speed.