From 24 to 29 July 2011, the Thirteenth Congress of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS) was held in the Austrian city of Graz. This society brings together organizations of scientists from all over the world, including Russia, and contributes to the development and coordination of research concerning the most diverse aspects of the history and culture of the Enlightenment.
The keynote of the 2011 Congress was Time in the broadest sense of this concept. More than twenty-five sections were devoted to various aspects of time: philosophical, psychological, scientific, everyday, and artistic. The neighborhood of reports, seemingly completely unrelated to each other, made it possible to draw thin lines of meaning connecting purely life realities (calendar reforms and death records in monastic books) with epochal trends (on the one hand, standardization of time measurement, and on the other - different "times" in the works of philosophers, historians and travelers, in fiction and diary entries, in painting and music).