Like giants immersed in time. Ontology, phenomenology, and Marcel Proust

Rivista di Estetica 70:92-106 (2019)
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Abstract

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, raises an interesting philosophical issue, namely, how can one be in touch with past things if they no longer exist? It provides us with a way to address this issue by outlining an ontological view according to which past things still exist within a four-dimensional world. Although one cannot be in touch with past things by means of ordinary perception, one can do so by combining perception and memory. In this sense, In Search of Lost Time helps us to reconcile a four-dimensionalist ontology according to which things have both spatial and temporal parts with a realist phenomenology according to which experience gives us access to things as they are. In so doing, Proust’s masterpiece allows us to shed some light on what it means for a subject of experience to exist in a four-dimensional world.

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Author Profiles

Enrico Terrone
Università degli Studi di Genova
Maurizio Ferraris
Università degli Studi di Torino

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References found in this work

Individuals.P. F. Strawson - 1959 - Garden City, N.Y.: Routledge.
Individuals.P. F. Strawson - 1959 - Les Etudes Philosophiques 14 (2):246-246.
Temporal Experience.L. A. Paul - 2010 - Journal of Philosophy 107 (7):333-359.
On the Experience of Time.Bertrand Russell - 1915 - The Monist 25 (2):212-233.

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