In this paper I revisit a dispute between Mikel Burley and Robin Le Poidevin about whether or not the B-theory of time can give its adherents any reason to be less afraid of death. In ‘Should a B-theoretic atheist fear death?’, Burley argues that even on Le Poidevin’s understanding of the B-theory, atheists shouldn’t be comforted. His reason is that the prevalent B-theoretic account of our attitudes towards the past and future precludes treating our fear of death as unwarranted. I (...) examine his argument and provide a tentative defense of Le Poidevin. I claim that while Burley rightly spots a tension with a non-revisionary approach to our ordinary emotional life, he doesn’t isolate the source of that tension. The real question is how to understand Le Poidevin’s idea that on the B-theory, we and our lives are ‘eternally real’. I then suggest that there is a view of time that does justice to Le Poidevin’s remarks, albeit a strange one. The view takes temporal relations to be quasi-spatial and temporal entities to exist in a totum simul. (shrink)

Cognitive science has recently made some startling discoveries about temporal experience, and these discoveries have been drafted into philosophical service. We survey recent appeals to cognitive science in the philosophical debate over whether time objectively passes. Since this research is currently in its infancy, we identify some directions for future research.

This dissertation offers new proposals, based on a philosophical appraisal of scientific findings, to address old philosophical problems regarding our immediate acquaintance with time. It focuses on two topics: our capacity to determine the length of intervals and our acquaintance with the present moment. A review of the relevant scientific findings concerning these topics grounds the main contributions of this dissertation. Thus, this study introduces to the philosophical literature an empirically adequate way to talk about how the mind represents time (...) at the most fundamental level. In order to account for our immediate acquaintance with the duration of intervals, a theoretical framework for classifying clocks is used to explain why the representational outputs of the circadian clock and the stopwatch have metric structure. A philosophical analysis of these outputs is proposed to classify them and explain their properties. With respect to our immediate acquaintance with the present, a novel two-phase model of the present is proposed. This model shows that there are two forms of acquaintance with the present, which has consequences for contemporary debates in the philosophy of time. (shrink)

There are several differences between (i) seeing rain outside one’s window and (ii) episodically remembering seeing rain outside one’s window. One difference appears to pertain to felt temporal orientation: in episodically remembering seeing the rain, we experience the rain, and/or the seeing of it, as (having occurred in the) past; in perceiving the rain, we experience the rain as (in the) present. However, according to (what is widely regarded as) the most plausible metaphysics of time, there are no such properties (...) as being past and being present. This seems to lead to an error theory about all perception and episodic memory. In this paper, I show how to get out of this untoward result. The crucial move is a distinction between representing an event-as-present/past and representing-as-present/past an event. (shrink)

In this chapter I argue that there can be no mental representation of objective ‘tensed’ features of reality of the kind that might be thought to occur when we experience time passing or think of times as past, present or future, whether or not such features are part of mind-independent reality. This, I hold, has important consequences for metaphysics; but (as will be most relevant to this volume) it is also likely to have important consequences for a correct semantics for (...) tense. In a nutshell, no correct semantics for tense can treat what philosophers call ‘A-properties’ (such as real pastness, presentness or futurity) as semantic values. (shrink)

A familiar slogan in the literature on temporal experience is that ‘a succession of appearances, in and of itself, does not amount to an experience of succession’. I show that we can distinguish between a strong and a weak sense of this slogan. I diagnose the strong interpretation of the slogan as requiring the support of an assumption I call the ‘Seems→Seemed’ claim. I then show that commitment to this assumption comes at a price: if we accept it, we either (...) have to reject the extremely plausible idea that experience is as it seems, or we are forced to provide an account of temporal experience that isn’t compatible with the phenomenology. I conclude by noting that the only plausible interpretation of the slogan is the weak interpretation, and outline a positive account of temporal experience, according to which an appearance of succession requires a succession of appearances. (shrink)

This article is a response to Clifford Williams’s claim that the debate between A- and B theories of time is misconceived because these theories do not differ. I provide some missing support for Williams’s claim that the B-theory includes transition, by arguing that representative B-theoretic explanations for why we experience time as passing (even though it does not) are inherently unstable. I then argue that, contra Williams, it does not follow that there is nothing at stake in the A- versus (...) B debate. (shrink)

Philosophers have long struggled to understand our perceptual experience of temporal properties such as succession, persistence and change. Indeed, strikingly, a number have felt compelled to deny that we enjoy such experience. Philosophical puzzlement arises as a consequence of assuming that, if one experiences succession or temporal structure at all, then one experiences it at a moment. The two leading types of theory of temporal awareness—specious present theories and memory theories—are best understood as attempts to explain how temporal awareness is (...) possible within the constraints of this principle. I argue that the principle is false. Neither theory of temporal awareness can be made workable unless it is rejected. Our experience of temporal phenomena cannot be understood if we attempt to break experience down into instantaneous slices. In order to understand the perception of temporal properties we must look beyond the instant. (shrink)

Presentism is, roughly, the ontological view that only the present exists. Among the philosophers engaged in the metaphysics of time there is wide agreement that presentism is intuitive (or commonsensical) and that its intuitiveness counts as evidence in its favour. My contribution has two purposes: first, defending the view that presentism is intuitive from some recent criticisms; second, putting forth a genealogical (or debunking) argument aimed at depriving presentism’s intuitiveness of the evidential value commonly granted to it.

The aim of this paper is to show that the A-theorist's argument from experience is undermined by a commitment to ‘experiential punctivism' - the view that instantaneous experiences are metaphysically prior to durative ones. The experiences to which the A-theorist's argument appeals are those of processual events. For these experiences to constitute perceptions of temporal passage it would be necessary to perceive such processes qua processes; but, if experiential punctivism were true, this would be impossible. We could only ever perceive (...) those processes qua temporal variation, which merely amounts to an awareness of change as described by the B-theory. If there is such a phenomenon as the passing of time, it could not be an object of our experience. (shrink)

We seem to experience time as flowing. Yet according to the leading metaphysical picture of time, the block-universe theory, time in fact does not flow. Block-lovers typically react to this apparent tension by unhitching the sense of flow in our temporal experience from temporal reality, holding that temporal experience is systematically illusory. I shall develop a new block-friendly account of the sense of flow, which preserves a match of temporal experience and temporal reality. According to this account, the sense of (...) flow arises from higher-order temporal experience. (shrink)

Consider a toothache, or a feeling of intense pleasure, or the sensation you would have if you looked impassively at an expanse of colour. In each case, the experience can easily be thought to fill time by being present throughout a period. This way of thinking of conscious experience is natural enough, but it is in deep conflict with the view that physical processes are ultimately responsible for experience. The problem is that physical processes are related to durations in a (...) very different way—not by being wholly present at each instant or sub-period, but by having temporal parts that are. There is a choice to be made, therefore, between preserving this common way of thinking of experience and preserving the fundamentality of processes. The first option holds fixed the view of experiences as occurring throughout time and takes this to constrain the category of entity to which they are identical, or upon which they supervene. The second option abandons this common view of experience by taking up a perspective on which we experience things in the world and their properties as existing or occurring a certain way, and mistakenly ascribe this ontological character to our experience as well. The second option is ultimately the better option, however, since only it can make sense of the facts of our experience. (shrink)

Philosophers frequently comment on the intimate connection there is between something’s being present in perceptual experience and that thing’s being, or at least appearing to be, temporally present. Yet, there is relatively little existing work that goes beyond asserting such a connection and instead examines its specific nature. In this paper, I suggest that we can make progress on the latter by looking at two more specific debates that have hitherto been conducted largely isolation from each other: one about the (...) nature of conscious experience and one about the nature of time itself. The first concerns the extent to which the temporal properties of experience form an exception to the transparency of experience, meaning that introspection can provide support for one particular view of how experience itself is structured temporally; the second concerns the question as to whether there is something about experience that gives us grounds for thinking that the present is somehow metaphysically special. As I argue, the idea of a connection between experiential presence and temporal presence plays a key background role in each of these debates. Yet it can also, in each of them, be seen to draw one side towards making claims that are supposed to express an important truth but are at the same time, on the face of it, self-contradictory. In each case, resolving what it actually is that these claims are trying to get at turns on recognizing a distinctive feature of perceptual experience, which I refer to as its lack of temporal viewpointedness. Recognising this feature also helps in making sense of what the issues at stake actually are in the intuition of an intimate connection between experiential presence and temporal presence. (shrink)

An explanatorily powerful approach to the modal dimension of knowledge is Robert Nozick’s idea that knowledge stands in a tracking relation to the world. However, pinning down a specific modal condition has proved elusive. In this paper, I offer a diagnosis and a positive proposal. The root of the problem, I argue, is the unquestioned assumption that tracking is a matter of directly preserving conformity between what is believed and what is the case in certain possible worlds. My proposal is (...) that what we track is whether the conditions for belief formation are appropriate in such worlds. Accordingly, we indirectly track the truth by ensuring that we only use our methods of belief formation in conditions that make it likely that conformity is preserved between what is believed and what is the case. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper addresses an underexplored puzzle about pictorial representation, a puzzle about how depiction of movement is possible. One aim is to clarify what the puzzle is. It might seem to concern a conflict between the nature of static surfaces and the dynamic things that they can depict. But the real conflict generating the puzzle is between the pictorial mode of presentation and what can be seen in pictures. A second aim of the paper is to solve the puzzle. (...) While many take it that depicting movement is to make visible something that has duration, I suggest that it is to make visible something atemporal. (shrink)

When philosophers of perception contemplate concrete examples, the tendency is to choose perceptions whose content does not essentially involve time, but concern how things are at the moment they are perceived. This is true whether the cases are veridical (seeing a tree as a tree) or illusory (misperceiving the colour or spatial properties of an object). Less discussed, and arguably more complex and interesting cases do involve time as an essential element: perceiving movement, for example, or perceiving the order and (...) comparative duration of events. And, like other kinds of perception, time perception can involve illusions, such as the puzzling ‘stopped clock’ illusion. I want to suggest that these dynamic cases, and perhaps particularly those involving illusion, make a distinctive contribution to the direct realist/sense datum theory debate over perception, and they undermine a popular argument in favour of the objective passage of time, namely that passage is an ineliminable feature of our temporal experience. (shrink)

Recent work in philosophy could benefit from paying greater attention to empirical results from cognitive science involving judgments about the nature of our ordinary experience. This paper describes the way that experimental and theoretical results about the nature of ordinary judgments could—and should—inform certain sorts of enquiries in contemporary philosophy, using metaphysics as an exemplar, and hence defines a new way for experimental philosophy and cognitive science to contribute to traditional philosophical debates.

This chapter presents an opinionated account of how to understand the contributions of experience, especially with respect to the role of cognitive science, in developing and assessing metaphysical theories of reality. I develop a methodological basis for the idea that, independently of work in experimental philosophy focused on explications of concepts, contemporary metaphysical theories with a role for experiential evidence can be fruitfully connected to empirical work in psychology, especially cognitive science. My argument is not that cognitive science should replace (...) the metaphysician’s use of a priori theorizing and ordinary experience as a guide to metaphysical reality. Rather, we should enrich our perspective on a priori theorizing and ordinary experience as a guide to metaphysical reality by drawing on any relevant work in cognitive science. (shrink)

This work introduces a causal explanation of the passage of time, and contrasts it with rival explanations. In the causal explanation, laws of physics are shown to entail that events are in causal succession, and the passage of time is defined as their causal succession. The causal explanation is coupled with phenomenology of the passage of time, and contrasted with the project of making sense of the idea that time does not pass.

Investigation into the reality of time can be pursued within the ontological domain or it can also span human thought and natural language. I propose to approach time by correlating three domains of inquiry: metaphysical time, the human concept of time, and temporal reference in natural language, entertaining the possibility of what I call a ‘horizontal reduction’ and ‘vertical reduction’. I present a view of temporalityL/E as epistemic modality, drawing on evidence from the L domain and its correlates in the (...) E and M domains. On this view, the human concept of time is a complex, ‘molecular’ concept and can be broken down into primitive concepts that are modal in nature, featuring as degrees of epistemic commitment to representations of states of affairs. I present evidence from tensed and tenseless languages and point out its compatibility with the view of real time as metaphysical modality. (shrink)

We discuss the three dominant models of the phenomenological literature pertaining to temporal consciousness, namely the cinematic, the retentional, and the extensional model. This is first done by presenting the distinction between acts and contents of consciousness and the assumptions underlying the different models concerning both the extendedness and duration of these two components. Secondly, we elaborate on the consequences related to whether a perspective of direct or indirect realism about temporal perceptions is assumed. Finally, we review some relevant findings (...) from the psychology and neuroscience of temporality in order to decide which of the three models of time consciousness is better confirmed from an empirical viewpoint. Depending on the time scale, all three models of temporal consciousness might apply. We specifically argue in favor of an extensional model of time consciousness for the experienced present where the acts and contents of consciousness are both extended. The retentional model might apply to longer time intervals covered by working memory. In addition, a predictive component is highlighted as decisive for an understanding of temporality. (shrink)

Phenomenologically speaking, we perceive the present, recall the past, and anticipate the future. We offer an account of the temporal content of the perceptual present that distinguishes it from the recalled past and the anticipated future. We distinguish two views: the Token Reflexive Account and the Minimal Account. We offer reasons to reject the Token Reflexive Account, and defend the Minimal Account, according to which the temporal content of the perceptual present is exhausted by its direct reference to the interval (...) of time over which it occurs. (shrink)

The non-credit bearing and ongoing education and development of mid- to late-career corporate executives is known by the compound term executive education. Reductively stated, executive education, for its corporate consumers and its business school providers, is predicated on the relationship between an order and its execution ; a relationship I call the “order-execution cognate”. With the word execution derived from Greek for sequence, and with the sequence of an execution following-on from its corresponding order, sequentiality is the essence of execution, (...) and the cognate. Executive education involves the amelioration of this order-execution cognate, to the ends of increased profits and competitiveness for the corporation concerned, and increased career prospects for the individual executive. Concerning sequentiality, and as a thesis on the philosophy of executive education, I apply a strand of ontological reflection to examine this cognate, namely philosophy concerning time and temporal succession. To aid in this task I use the English translations of writings on time by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Emerging from Heidegger’s thought are two temporal types that acknowledge and critique temporal succession; chronological time and Kairotic time respectively. By associating Heidegger’s philosophic method with that of early German Romantic philosophy, I articulate how it is possible to reconceive the temporal sequence of the order-execution cognate as a productive oscillation between chronic and Kairotic time; I call this oscillation “ironic temporality,” and its productivity “ironic productivity”. My philosophical analysis of commercially lucrative and neoliberal executive education is at odds with traditional knowledge-based analyses, affording a critique of the capitalist order which the educative event serves. Disrupting temporal notions of that event then becomes a dangerous political act; becomes the means to frame the educative event for the management of our age; and becomes the new orders for executive education. (shrink)

This paper focuses on whether static images can depict motion. It is natural to say that pictures depicting objects caught in the middle of a dynamic action—such as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s (1932) Behind the Gare St. Lazare—are pictures of movement, but, given that pictures themselves do not move, can we make sense of such an idea? Drawing on results from experimental psychology and cognitive sciences, I show that we can. Psychological studies on implicit motion and representational momentum indicate that motion is (...) really perceived in some static images: our visual system is built in order to detect motion, even where it is only implied, and to anticipate the probable outcomes of others’ actions—even when the ‘others’ are only the subject matters of pictures’. I argue that, consequently, a range of popular depiction theories—perceptualist theories of depiction—can accommodate depicted motion. (shrink)

There are two different varieties of question concerning the unity of consciousness: questions about unity at a time, and unity over time. A recent trend in the debate about unity has been to attempt to provide a ‘generalized’ account that purports to solve both problems in the same way. This attempt can be seen in the accounts of Barry Dainton and Michael Tye. In this paper, I argue that there are crucial differences between unity over time and unity at a (...) time that make it impossible to provide a generalized account of unity. The source of these crucial differences is the phenomenon of the ‘continuity of consciousness’. I argue that accounts of unity over time have to provide an account of this continuity, and that there is no phenomenon analogous to continuity in the case of unity at a time. Attention to the continuity of consciousness reveals crucial structural differences between the two varieties of unity. These structural differences make it impossible to provide a generalized account of unity. I show that the problems faced by Dainton’s and Tye’s accounts in the light of the structural differences make their accounts of unity appear far less appealing than they might initially have looked. I conclude by noting that, in the light of the important differences between the two varieties of unity, it is a mistake to attempt to model accounts of unity over time on accounts of unity at a time. (shrink)

Duration distortions familiar from trauma present an apparent counterexample to what we might call the naive view of duration perception. I argue that such distortions constitute a counterexample to naiveté only on the assumption that we perceive duration absolutely. This assumption can seem mandatory if we think of the alternative, relative view as limiting our awareness to the relative durations of perceptually presented events. However, once we recognize the constant presence of a stream of non-perceptual conscious mental activity, we can (...) provide an attractive, purely relative account of temporal distortions quite consistent with the naive view. I also consider (and reject) a second empirical challenge to the naive view arising from the so-called ‘oddball effect’. I conclude by tentatively pointing to further empirical data, traditionally accounted for in terms of an internal clock model of timing, which, I suggest, may be understood more illuminatingly by appeal to the idea that we perceive duration in part relative to concurrent non-perceptual mental activity. (shrink)

Recent philosophical work on temporal experience offers generic models that are often assumed to apply to all sensory modalities. I show that the models serve as broad frameworks in which different aspects of cognitive science can be slotted and, thus, are beneficial to furthering research programs in embodied music cognition. Here I discuss a particular feature of temporal experience that plays a key role in such philosophical work: a distinction between the experience of succession and the mere succession of experiences. (...) I question the presupposition that there is such an evident, clear distinction and suggest that, instead, how the distinction is drawn is context-dependent. After suggesting a way to modify the philosophical models of temporal experience to accommodate this contextdependency, I illustrate that these models can fruitfully incorporate features of research projects in embodied musical cognition. To do so I supplement a modified retentionalist model with aspects of recent work that links bodily movement with musical perception (Godøy, 2006; 2010a; Jensenius, Wanderley, Godøy, and Leman, 2010). The resulting model is shown to facilitate novel hypotheses, refine the notion of context-dependency and point towards means of extending the philosophical model and an existent research program. (shrink)

The experience of temporal flow is, for many, the central—if not the only—reason for believing an A-theory of time. Recently, however, B-theorists have argued that experience does not, in fact, favor the A-theory. Call such an argument: a debunking argument. The goal of the present paper is to defend the A-theory against two prominent versions of the debunking argument.

Brentano’s suggestion that intentionality is the mark of the mental is typically spelled out in terms of the thesis that all and only mental states are intentional. An influential objection is that intentionality is not necessary for mentality. What about the idea that only mental states are intentional? In his 2008 paper published in Analysis, Nes shows that on a popular characterization of intentionality, notably defended by Crane, some non-mental states come out as intentional. Crane replies that the concept of (...) representation solves the problem. In this paper, I argue that no representational account of intentionality meets Nes’s challenge. After distinguishing between two notions of representation, I contend that there are two versions of Crane’s representational account, but neither of them is able to solve the problem posed by Nes. (shrink)

This paper discusses the problem of inconsistencies in the metaphorical conceptualizations of time that involve motion within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT). It demonstrates that the TIME AS A PURSUER metaphor contrasts with the reverse variant TIME AS AN OBJECT OF PURSUIT, just as the MOVING TIME metaphor contrasts with the MOVING OBSERVER variant. Such metaphorical conceptualizations of time functioning as pairs of minimally differing variants based on Figure-Ground reversal are, strictly speaking, inconsistent with one another. Looking at (...) these inconsistencies from a wider perspective suggests that time may belong to a separate category of conceptual phenomena. This paper puts forward a proposal to approach time from the perspective of “phenomena of the third kind”, which according to Keller’s thesis include conceptual establishments resulting from human cognition, but not of human design. (shrink)

Our perceptual experiences stretch across time to present us with movement, persistence and change. How is this possible given that perceptual experiences take place in the present that has no duration? In this paper I argue that this problem is one and the same as the problem of accounting for how our experiences occurring at different times can be phenomenally unified over time so that events occurring at different times can be experienced together. Any adequate account of temporal experience must (...) also account for phenomenal unity. I look to Edmund Husserl's writings on time consciousness for such an account. (shrink)