This essay contests the view that humanity’s centuries-long experience with clocks is marked by a steady increase in time awareness that culminated in the modern compulsion known as “time discipline”. It argues, in contrast, that modern time discipline emerged during…

Physical orientation was a central philosophical problem for German thinkers in the late eighteenth century. Moses Mendelssohn, for instance, pondered in Morgenstunden, o Vorlesungen uber das Daseyn Gotten (1785) whether one can orient oneself in the metaphysical realm with the…