A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time is a concise and accessible survey of the history of philosophical and scientific developments in understanding time and our experience of time. It discusses prominent ideas about the nature of time, plus many subsidiary puzzles about time, from the classical period through the present.

This volume is a wide-ranging examination of denial and ideological denialism. It offers a readable overview of the psychology and social science of bias, self-deception, and denial, and examines the role of ideological denialism in conflicts over science and public policy, politics, and culture.

This edited collection presents the latest cutting-edge research in the philosophy and cognitive science of temporal illusions. Illusion and error have long been important points of entry for both philosophical and psychological approaches to understanding the mind. Temporal illusions, specifically, concern a fundamental feature of lived experience, temporality, and its relation to a fundamental feature of the world, time, thus providing invaluable insight into investigations of the mind and its relationship with the world. The existence of temporal illusions crucially challenges (...) the naïve assumption that we can simply infer the temporal nature of the world from experience. This anthology gathers eighteen original papers from current leading researchers in this subject, covering four broad and interdisciplinary topics: illusions of temporal passage, illusions and duration, illusions of temporal order and simultaneity, and the relationship between temporal illusions and the cognitive representation of time. (shrink)

‘Performative’ transcendental arguments exploit the status of a subcategory of self-falsifying propositions in showing that some form of skepticism is unsustainable. The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between performatively inconsistent propositions and transcendental arguments, and then to compare performative transcendental arguments to modest transcendental arguments that seek only to establish the indispensability of some belief or conceptual framework. Reconceptualizing transcendental arguments as performative helps focus the intended dilemma for the skeptic: performative transcendental arguments directly confront the (...) skeptic with the choice of abandoning either skepticism or some other deep theoretical commitment. Many philosophers, from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas to Jaakko Hintikka, C.I. Lewis, and Bernard Lonergan, have claimed that some skeptical propositions regarding knowledge, reason, and/or morality can be shown to be self-defeating; that is to say, they have claimed that the very upholding of some skeptical position is in some way incompatible with the position being upheld, or with the implied, broader dialectical position of the skeptic in question. Statements or propositions alleged to have this characteristic also sometimes are called ‘self-falsifying,’ ‘self-refuting,’ ‘self-stultifying,’ ‘self-destructive,’ or ‘pointless.’ However, proponents of the strategy of showing skepticism to be self-defeating have not in general adequately distinguished between two types of self-defeating proposition: self-falsifying and self-stultifying. In the first part of this paper I distinguish between self-falsifying and self-stultifying propositions, and introduce the notion of performative self-falsification. In the second part I discuss classical transcendental arguments, ‘modest’ transcendental arguments, and objections to each. In the third part I introduce two types of transcendental argument—each labeled “performative”—corresponding to two types of performatively self-falsifying proposition, and I compare them to modest transcendental arguments. (shrink)

The empiricist needs to explain the origin, in perception, of the idea of time. Kant believed the only answer was a kind of idealism about time. This essay examines Hume’s extensionalism as a possible answer to Kant. Extensionalism allegedly accounts for the experience of time via the manner of presentation of experiences, rather than the content of experience.

: Calls for ethics education for members of hospital ethics committees presume that the effects and benefits of such education are well-established. This is not the case. A review of the literature reveals that studies consistently have failed to uncover any significant effect of ethics education on the moral reasoning, moral competency, and/or moral development of medical professionals. The present paper discusses this negative result and describes the author's national study of the value priorities of members of hospital ethics committees. (...) This study discovered correlations between moral decision making and factors like age and type of institution where the committee operates. The results of this study also resemble those of previous studies in finding no correlation between ethics education and moral decision making. The author concludes that there is a need for more research on the effects of nonmoral personal, societal, and institutional factors on the moral reasoning of members of hospital ethics committees. Further, in the absence of any firm empirical basis, calls for ethics education for medical professionals and ethics committee members should be rethought. (shrink)

The theorist who denies the objective reality of non-relational temporal properties, or ‘A-series’ determinations, must explain our experience of the passage of time. D.H. Mellor, a prominent denier of the objective reality of temporal passage, draws, in part, on Kant in offering a theory according to which the experience of temporal passage is the result of the projection of change in belief. But Mellor has missed some important points Kant has to make about time-awareness. It turns out that Kant's theory (...) of time-awareness also involves projection – but for him, the projection of temporal passage is necessary to any coherent experience at all, and for this reason events in the world cannot be represented except as exhibiting real tensed change. Consequently we cannot intelligibly suppose the world we know to be without the passage of time. This fact would permit a modest transcendental argument the conclusion of which is that we are entitled to describe the world in terms of temporal passage. (shrink)

The last century has seen enormous progress in our understanding of time. This volume features original essays by the foremost philosophers of time discussing the goals and methodology of the philosophy of time, and examining the best way to move forward with regard to the field's core issues. The collection is unique in combining cutting edge work on time with a focus on the big picture of time studies as a discipline. The major questions asked include: What are the implications (...) of relativity and quantum physics on our understanding of time? Is the passage of time real, or just a subjective phenomenon? Are the past and future real, or is the present all that exists? If the future is real and unchanging, how is free will possible? Since only the present moment is perceived, how does the experience as we know it come about? How does experience take on its character of a continuous flow of moments or events? What explains the apparent one-way direction of time? Is time travel a logical/metaphysical possibility? (shrink)

The issue of time-awareness presents a critical challenge for empiricism: if temporal properties are not directly perceived, how do we become aware of them? A unique empiricist account of time-awareness suggested by Hume's comments on time in the Treatise avoids the problems characteristic of other empiricist accounts. Hume's theory, however, has some counter-intuitive consequences. The failure of empiricists to come up with a defensible theory of time-awareness lends prima facie support to a non-empiricist theory of ideas.

This essay aims to review and clarify an emerging consensus among philosophers of time: that belief in the passage of time is not a matter of illusion but rather the result of a variety of cognitive error. I argue that this error is best described in terms of psychological projection, properly understood. A close analysis of varieties of projection reveals how well this phenomenon accounts for belief in dynamic temporal passage and the objective becoming of events. A projectivist account of (...) belief in the passage of time is, in actuality, already predominant in contemporary philosophy of time; but the language of illusion still used by many theorists is hampering recognition of the nature of the solution as well as the recent progress towards consensus. (shrink)

From a number of quarters have come attempts to answer some form of skepticism—about knowledge of the external world, freedom of the will, or moral reasons—by showing it to be performatively self-defeating. Examples of this strategy are subject to a number of criticisms, in particular the criticism that they fail to shift the burden of proof from the anti-skeptical position, and so fail to establish the epistemic entitlement they seek. To these approaches I contrast one way of understanding Kant’s core (...) anti-skeptical arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s goal is the more modest one of showing the applicability of the concepts of substance and cause to experience, against those who might call such application incoherent, or a category mistake. I explain why this goal makes Kant’s approach more promising than those of neo-Kantian practitioners of otherwise structurally-similar strategies. (shrink)

In this essay I address the question of the reality of temporal passage through a discussion of some of the implications of Kant's reasoning concerning the necessary conditions of objective judgement. Some theorists have claimed that the attribution of non‐relational temporal properties to objects and events represents a conceptual confusion, or ‘category mistake’. By means of an examination of Kant's Second Analogy, and a comparison between that argument and Cassam's recent exploration of an argument regarding the necessity of the conceptualisation (...) of ourselves as spatially located, I draw out a consequence of Kant's argument: namely, that the representation of temporal becoming is a necessary condition of objective judgement and an a priori element in the representation of objects of experience. I finish by explaining why this would show that the attribution of temporal becoming to objects and events cannot be described as a category mistake. (shrink)

Kant’s three Analogies of Experience, in his Critique of Pure Reason, represent a highly condensed attempt to establish the metaphysical foundations of Newtonian physics. His strategy is to show that the organization of experience in terms of a world of enduring substances undergoing mutual causal interaction is a necessary condition of the temporal ordering even of one’s own subjective states, and thus of coherent experience itself. In his Third Analogy—an examination of the necessary conditions of judgments of simultaneous existence—he argues (...) that certain conceptual presuppositions consistent with Newtonian physics are necessary to time-awareness. His argument, however, appears to be undermined by conventionalism in natural science generally, and by the conventionality of simultaneity in particular. In this paper I discuss Kant’s claims in light of contemporary relativity theory. I suggest that, while his project is obsolete in major respects, there may still be useful insights into time-awareness to be drawn from his work. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga's externalist analysis of epistemic warrant centres on the proper function of the relevant belief-forming mechanism, where proper function is fixed relative to the design plan of the organism in question. He has set this analysis against reliabilism, the other leading externalist contender for the analysis of warrant. Though Plantinga's discussion advances the field of epistemology in a number of important ways, his treatment of warrant is limited by his assumption of creationism in his understanding of design and function. (...) Further, analyses of epistemic warrant focusing on function over reliability either fail at handling problem cases reliabilism can handle, or fail to improve on problem cases for reliabilism. Thus no proper functionalist analysis like Plantinga's can supersede a well-constructed reliabilist analysis. (shrink)

In the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant laments thatit still remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence of things outside us … must be accepted on faith, and if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof. The two editions of the Critique each contain a celebrated refutation of epistemological scepticisms like those of Descartes and Hume. (...) The first edition refutation has been widely decried as relying on an objectionable sort of idealism. The refutation of the second edition, though rather more difficult to interpret than the first, has usually been read as a mere reworking of the first. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Leibniz’s account of the epistemic status of the Christian Mysteries in his “Preliminary Dissertation on the Conformity of Faith with Reason.” In it, the Mysteries are held to be true, yet also to be beyond human comprehension. This conjunction gives rise to a dilemma: how can the Mysteries bemeaningfully asserted if they are unintelligible? To answer this, Leibniz compares them to natural truths, which are demonstrable by God alone. To complicate matters, however, he suggests that (...) certain Mysteries have the status of truths of logic, or of mathematics; this raises a special problem in understanding his view of the epistemic status of such Mysteries for us. I offer a suggestion as to how he may have wanted us to think of the relationship between these Mysteries and our faculty of comprehension. I then employ my conclusions in explaining Leibniz’s answer to Bayle’s skepticism regarding the Mysteries, as well as in explaining his answer to the question as to how belief in the Mysteries can be rationally justified. (shrink)

In this essay I address the question of the reality of temporal passage through a discussion of some of the implications of Kant's reasoning concerning the necessary conditions of objective judgement. Some theorists have claimed that the attribution of non‐relational temporal properties to objects and events represents a conceptual confusion, or ‘category mistake’. By means of an examination of Kant's Second Analogy, and a comparison between that argument and Cassam's recent exploration of an argument regarding the necessity of the conceptualisation (...) of ourselves as spatially located, I draw out a consequence of Kant's argument: namely, that the representation of temporal becoming is a necessary condition of objective judgement and an a priori element in the representation of objects of experience. I finish by explaining why this would show that the attribution of temporal becoming to objects and events cannot be described as a category mistake. (shrink)

This edited collection presents the latest cutting-edge research in the philosophy and cognitive science of temporal illusions. Illusion and error have long been important points of entry for both philosophical and psychological approaches to understanding the mind. Temporal illusions, specifically, concern a fundamental feature of lived experience, temporality, and its relation to a fundamental feature of the world, time, thus providing invaluable insight into investigations of the mind and its relationship with the world. The existence of temporal illusions crucially challenges (...) the naïve assumption that we can simply infer the temporal nature of the world from experience. This anthology gathers eighteen original papers from current leading researchers in this subject, covering four broad and interdisciplinary topics: illusions of temporal passage, illusions and duration, illusions of temporal order and simultaneity, and the relationship between temporal illusions and the cognitive representation of time. (shrink)

The Kantian moral foundations of Nozickian libertarianism suggest that the claim that self‐ownership grounds only negative rights to property should be rejected. The moral foundations of Nozick's libertarianism better support basing property rights on moral desert. It is neither incoherent nor implausible to say that need can be a basis for desert. By implication, the libertarian contention that persons ought to be respected as persons living self‐shaping lives is inconsistent with the libertarian refusal to accept that claims of need can (...) sometimes outweigh claims to property. (shrink)

In this essay I revisit Kant’s largely-ignored Third Analogy of Experience with an eye to what it may yet contribute to our understanding of time perception. The essay begins with an elucidation of the purpose of the Third Analogy, followed by an account of how the core argument is intended to work. It then summarizes the problem that has left the Third Analogy out of much of the scholarly literature on Kant. I respond by introducing two ways of scaling back (...) on Kant’s claims. First, I offer a revisionary interpretation of the Third Analogy as a “modest” transcendental argument; second, I propose a re-imagining of the Analogy such that it yields an empirical hypothesis that might be of use in developmental psychology. (shrink)

An anti-skeptical transcendental argument can be loosely defined as an argument that purports to show that some experience or knowledge of an external world is a necessary condition of our possession of some knowledge, concept, or cognitive ability that we know we have. In this dissertation I examine transcendental arguments by focusing on one such argument given by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, along with some attempts to interpret that argument by contemporary commentators. ;I proceed by dividing (...) anti-skeptical transcendental arguments into three types: epistemological, verificationist, and psychological. I examine arguments of the first two types and show why they cannot succeed against the skeptic. I then argue that Kant's Refutation of Idealism is of a different type: it is psychological in that it concerns the necessary conditions of our forming beliefs of certain kinds. Many contemporary Kant scholars have claimed that his anti-skeptical strategy relies on phenomenalism or verificationism; I argue, however, that Kant in the Refutation employs a clever and hitherto unappreciated strategy which involves an empiricist principle concerning the origin of simple ideas, and which does not require either phenomenalism or verificationism. I conclude with an analysis and assessment of Kant's argument. (shrink)

This is the introduction chapter of A Companion to the Philosophy of Time, which tackles the historical development of the philosophy of time. This volume brings together experts in the various branches of the philosophy of time from around the world. Part I of this volume features essays on the philosophy of time from the pre‐Socratic period through the twentieth century. Parts II and III reflect, respectively, on the physics and metaphysics of time, and on the study of the experience (...) of time. Together, Parts II and III address the fundamental question of contemporary time studies: distinguishing between time as it is in itself, and time as humans perceive and experience it; between the scientific and manifest images of time. (shrink)