Here, I put forward a new account of how experience gives rise to the belief that time passes. While there is considerable disagreement amongst metaphysicians as to whether time really does pass, it has struck many as a default, ‘common sense’ way of thinking about the world. A popular way of explaining how such a belief arises is to say that it seems perceptually as though time passes. Here I outline some difficulties for this approach, and propose instead that the (...) belief in time passing is elicited by a particular feature of agentive experience. When we deliberately move our bodies, bring something to mind, or focus our attention, we experience ourselves as the sources of these actions. Sensing oneself as a source, I argue, is a unique type of change experience, one which leads us to a belief that time is passing. (shrink)

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav describes the tzaddik as experiencing time in a distinctive, enlightened way: What is seventy years for the rest of us feels like a mere fifteen minutes for the tzaddik. Furthermore, even higher levels of enlightenment are possible—for a tzaddik on a higher level, what feels like seventy years for the first tzaddik is again but a mere fifteen minutes. This pattern continues, approaching a limit point which Rabbi Nachman calls “above time,” and which is the perspective (...) on time of the Divine. How might Rabbi Nachman’s claims about enlightened temporal experience be understood? In this paper, my aim is to examine some ways of understanding what it might mean to ‘experience time more quickly’ or to ‘experience 70 years as 15 minutes’ in light of contemporary theories of the structure of temporal experience. I then present a novel interpretation of Rabbi Nachman’s claims which appeals to the contemporary notion of the specious present —a nonzero temporal interval experienced in a unified way as present. (shrink)

How must experience of time be structured in time? In particular, does the following principle, which I will call inheritance, hold: for any temporal property apparently presented in perceptual experience, experience itself has that same temporal property. For instance, if I hear Paul McCartney singing ‘Hey Jude’, must my auditory experience of the ‘Hey’ itself precede my auditory experience of the ‘Jude’, or can the temporal order of these experiences come apart from the order the words are experienced as having? (...) A number of recent authors (Phillips Experience and Time, ‘The Temporal Structure of Experience’, Soteriou ‘Perceiving Events’, Hoerl ‘“A Succession of Feelings, in and of Itself, is Not a Feeling of Succession”’, Rashbrook) claim, to paraphrase Martin (399), that inheritance best characterises how our temporal experience seems to initial reflective intuition. For this reason, Phillips takes the principle to form part of our naïve view of temporal experience. An opposing group of theorists object that inheritance is subject to empirical counter-example. This article surveys such challenges. Section 2 considers Grush's case against inheritance based on postdiction. Section 3 examines Watzl's anti-inheritance argument based on silencing effects. Finally, Section 4 explores a number of alleged counter-examples proposed by Lee (‘Temporal Experience and the Temporal Structure of Experience’). Section 1 provides essential background to the debate. (shrink)

The naïve view of temporal experience (Phillips, in: Lloyd D, Arstila V (eds) Subjective time: the philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of temporality, forthcoming-a) comprises two claims. First, that we are perceptually aware of temporal properties, such as succession and change. Second, that for any temporal property apparently presented in experience, our experience itself possesses that temporal property. In his paper ‘Silencing the experience of change’ (forthcoming), Watzl argues that this second naïve inheritance thesis faces a novel counter-example in the form (...) of the striking motion silencing effects recently demonstrated by Suchow and Alvarez (Curr Biol 21(2):140–143, 2011). Here I clarify the form which any counter-example to naïve inheritance must take. I then explain how, on a plausible, rival ‘crowding’ interpretation of Suchow and Alvarez’s data, motion silencing poses no more of a threat to naïve inheritance than standard cases of change blindness. (shrink)

Why does time seem to fly by when we are absorbed? The case of listening to music is of particular interest, given that listening to music itself requires experiencing time. In this paper, I argue that neither the prevailing psychological model nor some initially appealing alternative explanations can account for the experience of time flying by in cases where, like listening to music, the activity we are absorbed in itself requires experiencing time. I then put forward a novel view on (...) which the fragmentation of felt time is what best explains these cases. More specifically, I develop a view on which attentive engagement fragments felt time such that we experience the activity we are engaged in as if it is located in a temporally isolated branch or fragment of the main timeline. Time then seems to pass only in this branch, creating the sensation — upon integration — that less time has passed in the main timeline. In support of this proposal, I draw upon ideas in the empirical literature, and I suggest some underlying neuropsychological mechanisms that might serve to implement the model. I then extend the fragmentation model to cases where thinking about time makes it feel as though more of it passes. I end the paper by examining the possibility that an analogous model holds for the case of space. (shrink)

Humans are complex systems, ‘macro-entities’, whose existence, behaviour and consciousness stem out of the configurations of physical entities on the micro-level of the physical world. But an explanation of what humans do and think cannot be found through ‘tracking us back’, so to speak, to micro-particles. So, in explaining human behaviour, including linguistic behaviour on which this paper focuses, emergentism opens up a powerful opportunity to explain what it is exactly that emerged on that level, bearing in mind the end (...) product in the form of the intra- and inter-cultural diversity. Currently there is a gap in emergentism research. On one hand, there are discussions in philosophy of the emergent human reality; on the other, there are discussions of social, cultural, or individual variation of these emergent aspects of humanity in the fields of anthropology, sociology, linguistics or psychology. What I do in this paper is look for a way to ‘trace’ some such diversified emergents from what is universal about their ‘coming to being’, all the way through to their diversification. My chosen emergent is human time, my domain of inquiry is natural-language discourse, and the drive behind this project is to understand the link between ‘real’ time of spacetime on the micro-level from which we emerged and the human time devised by us, paying close attention to the overwhelming diversity in which temporal reference is expressed in human languages. The main question is, where does this diversity fit in? Does understanding of this diversity, as well as of what lurks under the surface of this diversity, aid the emergentism story? My contribution to this volume on ‘the nature of structure and the structure of nature’ thus takes the following take on the title. The structure of human communication is at the same time uniform, universal, and relative to culture, in that it is emergent as a human characteristic, and as such compatible with the micro-level correlates in some essential ways, but also free to fly in different directions that are specific to societies and cultures. I explore here the grey area between the micro-level and the linguistic reflections of time—the middle ground that is emergent itself but that tends to be by-passed by those who approach the question of human flowing time from either end: metaphysics and the philosophy of time on the one hand, and contrastive linguistics, anthropological linguistics and language documentation on the other. I illustrate the debate with examples from tensed and tenseless languages from different language families, entertaining the possibility of a conceptual universal pertaining to time as degrees of epistemic modality. Needless to say, putting the question in this way also sets out my (not unassailable) methodology. (shrink)

The Scottish philosopher Norman Kemp Smith (1872–1958) is best known for his 1929 English translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and for his incisive commentaries on Descartes, Hume, and Kant. These achievements have overshadowed his original philosophical work in several areas, including the experience of time. A realist with idealist sympathies, Kemp Smith developed a non-transcendental version of Kant’s conception of time as a ‘pure intuition’ (though he insisted that temporal perception involved ‘categories’). He employed this conception to solve (...) a problem that was widely discussed in early twentieth-century European and American philosophy, which William James dubbed the ‘specious present’: how can we perceive an extended duration, like a full golf swing, or the cadence of a brief tune, if we only perceive the present? A closely related problem: if we only ever perceive the present, how can we distinguish among the future, present, and past? In this paper, I explain Kemp Smith’s proposed solution, and compare it with two of his contemporary influences: Samuel Alexander and George F. Stout. Finally, I suggest that these problems are still with us, and are likely to be for some time, especially if we ignore the insights offered by earlier discussions. (shrink)

In this thesis I present a phenomenological investigation of our experience of time – of things as they fall within time – and suggest that something important goes missing in recent debates. This is the notion of a point of view. I believe that articulating the sense in which we have a point of view in time, and what this is a point of view upon, is crucial to an account of how things are for an experiencing subject. In the (...) first chapter, I elucidate the specious present. I argue that theorists appeal to the specious present under two guises without explicitly distinguishing between them; yet these two conceptions are not identical, while one entails the other the reverse is not true. In the second chapter I defend an appeal to the specious present against proponents of what I refer to as snapshot models of temporal experience. I argue that perceptual experience minimally presents something of some non-zero temporal extent as such. In the third chapter I discuss how we are to characterise experience over intervals of time of a greater extent than the specious present. I offer a proposal on which a subject is invariably presented with a positive temporal extent, with this interval marking the partition between the past and the future for the subject. In the fourth chapter I compare and contrast our experience of objects and events, and our experiential point of view in space and in time. Among other things, I argue that getting right how things are for the subject requires an appeal to the subject’s asymmetrical awareness of times either side of the specious present. In fifth and final chapter I demonstrate that appeal to an experiencing subject’s tensed temporal perspective can explain the sense in which time seems to pass. (shrink)