The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges has found in philosophy a way to ilustrate various metaphysical problems concerning the question of human existence. One of those is the problem of the time to which Borges is always returning. It portrays it through the image of the Heraclitus' River, which is made up of passing individuals that are subject to eternal change. Borges in his works, such as The Other, and the essay entitled Time, presents the position of man in Heraclitus' course of the river, which experiences time as a sequence of moments, since the time as a whole remains unknown. This explanation of time and the philosophical thought of George Berkeley serve him as a philosophical reflection on the existence of the time which he tries to deny in his essay A New Refutation of Time. Through the philosophical reflection based on the ideas of Hume and Berkeley, Borges displays denial of time as a negation of a sequence consisting of moments, which we can not think of as a whole. However, the question of time no longer represents an eternal problem on the planet Tlön, which is driven by the flow of continuous perceptions. The only reality recognized by Borges, considering the influence of philosophers analized in the following, is the present. Among others philosofical references, also the idea of Arthur Schopenhauer defends the existence of the present. In works such as El Zahir y Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale Borges shows how Schopenhuaer's principle of will, which is always seeking life, is realized in order to ensure the existence of a species, and also the artistic contemplation as the only possible form of denial of the will.
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