Aporías de la enunciación y del tiempo en Confesiones, XI

Abstract

This paper aims to highlight the link between the problematic horizont of the Augustinians questions on enuntiation and time, developed in Confessions XI, and the arguments of academic skepticism, as they are found in the aporetic questions present in Sextus Empiricus’ texts. Such link will be exposed through two aporias, that of the enuntiation and that of time. The aporia of enuntiation is developed in Sextus’ texts as the impossibility of enunatiation, since this one would constitute a successive hole composed by parts that are not. Therefore, their existence would be impossible, since it can not exist a whole whose parts do not exist. St. Augustin overcomes this impossibility from the analysis of the same enuntiation and the acts of spirit that make this reality
possible. The time aporia is developed by Sextus through fi ve reductio ad absurdum arguments, of which this paper choose the exposition of three: the existence of time as limited or unlimited, as divisible or indivisible, or as composed of three existing temporary instances, past, present and future. This aporia is also overcome by the activity of the spirit and the distentio animi. Time and lenguage link themselves intrinsically in an exposition that that approaches their supposed aporias from the transition to the reality of human spirit.