Abstract
The collection of the eight texts from the last decade (six of them revised, the introductory and the last text newly written) focus largely on the issue of the relation between the spatio-temporal and the linguistic charakter of our experience or, put differently, on what role the different 'sense' of time and of space play in our understanding of meaning. The experience of meaning is considered from the viewpoint of the present, which stands here not merely for one temporal dimension but for the presence in the world, i.e. for the bond between the present and the co-present (non-present).
The presence so conceived is examined by considering thinkers who decisively structured the concept of present in its temporal sense (Plato, Bergson, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), though with the further aim of developing a broader conception of presence. Furthermore, the attempt to clarify the relationship between understanding in general and scientific knowledge, undertaken in some of the texts, is directed to a conception of Being as individual presence in the world, which is also participated in by things and by beings which have no language and do not relate to the all-encompassing dimensions of space and time.