Nonphilosophers, if they think of philosophy at all, wonder why people work in metaphysics. After all, metaphysics, as Auden once said of poetry, makes nothing happen.1 Yet some very intelligent people are driven to spend their lives exploring metaphysical theses. Part of what motivates metaphysicians is the appeal of grizzly puzzles (like the paradox of the heap or the puzzle of the ship of Theseus). But the main reason to work in metaphysics, for me at least, is to understand the (...) shared world that we all encounter and interact with. And the shared world that we all encounter includes us self-conscious beings and our experience. The world that we inhabit is unavoidably a temporal world: the signing of the Declaration of Independence is later than the Lisbon earthquake; the Cold War is in the past; your death is in the future. There is no getting away from time. (shrink)

In response to a recent challenge that the New B-theory of Time argues invalidly from the claim that tensed sentences have tenseless truth conditions to the conclusion that temporal reality is tenseless, I argue that while early B-theorists may have relied on some such inference, New B-theorists do not. Giving tenseless truth conditions for tensed sentences is not intended to prove that temporal reality is tenseless. Rather, it is intended to undermine the A-theorist’s move from claims (...) about the irreducibility of tensed language to the conclusion that temporal reality must be tensed. I then examine how A-theorists have used facts about language in attempting to establish their conclusions about the nature of temporal reality. I take the recent work of William Lane Craig and argue that he implicitly and illicitly moves from facts about temporal language to his conclusion that temporal reality is tensed. (shrink)

It is usually agreed that reality is temporal in the sense of containing entities that exist in time, but some philosophers, roughly those who have been traditionally called A-theorists, hold that reality is temporal in a far more profound sense than what is implied by the mere existence of such entities. This hypothesis of deep temporality typically involves two ideas: that reality is temporally compartmentalised into distinct present, past, and future ‘realms’, and that this compartmentalisation (...) is temporally dynamic in the sense that the boundaries of those temporal realms change from one moment to the next. The truth of something like this hypothesis is commonly thought to require that at least some of the facts that fundamentally constitute reality be tensed. While this seems plausible, realism about fundamental tensed facts does not seem to entail deep temporality. Nor is it clear exactly what realism about tense amounts to, given that no informative answer has been given to the question of what it is for a fact to be tensed. In this paper, I introduce a novel approach, perspectivalism about temporal reality, that seeks to vindicate the hypothesis of deep temporality by ascribing to reality a certain kind of temporally perspectival structure, which also provides a straightforward answer to the question of what the tensedness of facts consists in as well as to the question of what it is for reality to be constituted by such facts. (shrink)

The thesis revolves around the following questions. What is time? Is time tensed or tenseless? Do things endure or perdure, i.e. do things persist by being wholly present at many times, or do they persist by having temporal parts? Do causes bring their effects into existence, or are they only correlated with each other? Within a realist approach to metaphysics, the author claims that the tensed view of time, the endurance view of persistence, and the production view of causality (...) naturally combine into what is called the dynamic view of temporal reality, and that the tenseless view of time, the perdurance view of persistence, and the correlation view of causality naturally combine into what is called the static view of temporal reality. The author argues in favour of a dynamic view. During the discussion a number of metaphysical problems are addressed. First, it is argued that the charges that the dynamic view is contradictory, made by J.M.E. McTaggart and David Lewis, are viciously circular. Secondly, it is argued that the static view cannot account for change, and deprives metaphysics of essential means to provide natural explanations to empirical phenomena. Thirdly, the author presents a novel account of the nature of necessary causal production. He suggests that the traditional conception of causes as essentially being external to the effects should be abandoned, and that causal production instead should be explicated in terms of reciprocal interactions between coexistent substances. (shrink)

I first distinguish several notions that have traditionally been conflated (or otherwise neglected) in discussions of the metaphysics of time. Thus, for example, I distinguish between the passage of time and temporal becoming. The former is, I maintain, a confused notion that does not represent a feature of the world; whereas a proper understanding of the latter provides the key for a plausible and comprehensive account of the nature of temporal reality. There are two general classes of (...) views of the nature of temporal reality; proponents of particular views in both classes attempt to account for the phenomenon of temporal becoming in terms of qualitative change. I argue that any such account – in terms of change – is irredeemably problematic. And so I propound a different account of temporal becoming, based on the notion that temporal reality is transient, which provides the means to characterize intuitively and vividly the significant effects of time on the metaphysical nature of the world. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is twofold: First, to critically discuss Lynne Rudder's Baker BA-theory of time, and second to contrast it with the R-theory (after Russell). In the course of my discussion I will contrast three different methodological approaches regarding the relation between common sense and ontology; clarify Russell's authentic view in contrast to the B-theory which is McTaggart's misrepresentation of Russell, and consider how the R-theory can respond to objections Baker makes to eternalism (as she understands it).

This paper argues that 'duality' accounts of time, as exemplified by Henri Bergson's, Edmund Husserl's, and John McTaggart's ideas, parallel the decomposition of temporal experience in depressive psychosis into objective and subjective dimensions of time. The paper also proposes to comprehend the full-fledged depressive temporal delusion, in which the subjective flow of time comes to a standstill, via the idea of a double orientation to reality characteristic of schizophrenic delusions. In the depressive temporal delusion a person (...) claims that time is not moving while simultaneously her cognitive orientation in temporal surroundings remains largely unaffected, hence the double orientation. The juxtaposition of temporal experience in depression with the temporal disorientation in dementia enables us to situate the depressive delusion regarding the flow of time in the middle of a proposed scale of the disintegration of normal temporal experience. (shrink)

Temporal becoming is usually considered the essence of the concept of time. But in our century most physicists and philosophers have defended the view that becoming is dependent on the existence of conscious beings and that there is no ontological difference between past and future. I evaluate these related claims both in light of their conceptual implications and by bringing to bear our best spacetime theories. ;Since a mind-independent becoming should be grounded in an ontological, non-epistemic asymmetry between past (...) and future, I discuss the philosophical motivations for various "non-full views" of the future in contrast to the view that the future is as real as the past. I present the disagreement between these views both in terms of what is and in terms of possession of a definite truth value, thereby distinguishing an ontological and a semantic formulation. A formal definition of the "tree model" of reality allows a clear distinction of the often conflated notions of 'determinate', 'determined' and 'stable', and helps to formulate the differences between the "non-full" views and the "full view" of reality. ;To settle the issue concerning these views, I bring into the discussion the special theory of relativity . I show that oft-discussed arguments against the openness of the future presuppose a clarification of the properties of the relation 'being determinate for', in particular symmetry and transitivity. Within STR, objective becoming can be defended at the cost of relativizing what is determinate to spacetime points, of making the relation of determinedness time-asymmetric, and of denying determinateness to spacelike-related events. ;I conclude by urging that mind-independent temporal becoming can find a more hospitable environment in some isotropic cosmological models of general relativity, a claim that has been unreasonably neglected. If the universe does not present causal anomalies , the proper time of a co-moving 'fundamental particle' can be made common to every other world line. The existence of such a cosmic time would make current scientific talk of 'cosmic evolution' and 'the future of the universe' non-metaphorical. (shrink)

Within the context of the contemporary heterogeneity of photographic practices, the present text describes some of the possibilities of understanding the temporality of photographs, giving an account of some important theoretical references. Bearing this in mind, describing photographs as sparks of reality is a way of expanding the Benjaminian proposal and avoiding the strict logics of causality. The strength of photography unfolds the technologically rooted paradox of photographs, whose contemporary relevance can be analysed in the intersection between aesthetics, history (...) and politics. The film 48, by the Portuguese filmmaker Susana Sousa Dias, explores this intersection by using and showing the cracks of the political prisoners’ mug shots. (shrink)

What is the nature of time? This new study engages with the philosophy of Henri Bergson on time and proposes a new way of thinking about the effects of future events on the past. According to Bergson, time is an integral feature of real things, just as much as their material or size. When a flower grows, it takes a period of real time for it to flourish, which cannot be quickened or slowed down, nor can it be eliminated from (...) the process of growth. Bergson named this real time 'duration' and argued that everything and everyone exist as duration, and that internal processes flow into one another, with no clear boundaries that separate one phase of duration from another. According to Bergson's philosophy, the past does not disappear but smoothly flows into the present, forming an indivisible dynamic unity. But what if the causal flow of temporal reality is not unidirectional? What if not only past events influence future ones, but future ones in their turn have retrospective effect on past occurrences? The author of this book analyses these key questions, asserts that the changeability of the past follows from Bergson's theory of time and proposes a theory of embodied time that involves the retrospective enrichment of reality. (shrink)

Within the framework of 'Temporalities and the Urban Fabric: Co-Producing Liminal Spaces in Transitional Epochs,' this rigorous examination unravels the multilayered nuances of temporality and its intimate relationship with urban spaces in times of transition. The research delineates the intricate interplay between public exhibitions, urban realms, and socio-political paradigms, particularly within the dynamic settings of the metropolitan entities of Houston and Amsterdam. These cities, as epitomes of temporal urban flux, become fertile grounds for exploring the ephemeral essence of liminal (...) spaces and their transformative manifestations. By weaving together diverse academic domains – from Design Computation and Fabrication to Urban Communities and Spatial Justice – this study underscores the symbiotic fusion of Augmented Reality (AR) and Gamification within the broader canvas of urban temporalities. Crucially, the research accentuates the transformative potential of Extended Reality (XR) in augmenting the theoretical and methodological contours of urban studies within these transitional epochs. (shrink)

This article examines discourses about mixed reality as a data-rich sensing technology – specifically, engaging with discourses of time as framed by developers, engineers and in corporate PR and marketing in a range of public facing materials. We focus on four main settings in which mixed reality is imagined to be used, and in which time was a dominant discursive theme – the development of mixed reality by big tech companies, the use of mixed reality for (...) defence, mixed reality as a technology for control of populations in civil society and mixed reality as a technology used in workplace settings. Across these settings, the broad narrative is that mixed reality technologies afford overwhelmingly positive benefits like efficiency and security through their capture, relay and rendition of data – affording a form of anticipatory power to the user. The framing of temporality, we argue, is underlain by social and political values, which represent certain interests, but leave others out in the imagination of mixed reality's technological advance. (shrink)

Lucy Allais presents an original interpretation of Kant's transcendental idealism. She argues that his distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear to us has both epistemological and metaphysical components. Kant is committed to a genuine idealism about things as they appear to us, but this is not a phenomenalist idealism. He is committed to the claim that there is an aspect of reality that grounds mind-dependent spatio-temporal objects, and which we cannot cognize, but he does (...) not assert the existence of distinct non-spatio-temporal objects. On Allais's account, we cannot understand Kant's idealism without a clear account of his notion of intuition and of the role of intuition in cognition: she understands Kantian intuitions as representations that give us acquaintance with the objects of thought. This enables us to make sense of Kant's central argument for his idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and to see why he takes the complete idealist position to be established there. (shrink)

The article considers the spatial and temporal changes manifested in the virtual form of gamification of existence. The definition of the virtual form of gamification of existence is given. On the basis of included observation, the spatial and temporal transformations of socio-cultural reality are rethought, and the philosophical-anthropological approach makes it possible to establish the dependence of the strategies of individual and group behaviour on the inclusion of game actions in the virtual existence. The analysis of the (...) virtual form of gamification of existence as an event and as a co-being is given. The virtual form of gamification of existence is supported by artificially created events, presented as serious incidents, replaced by new ones for tomorrow. The transformation of the structure of free time is considered, which allows transferring most of the life of a contemporary into leisure. The spatial and temporal model of the virtual form of gamification of human existence visually and mentally dissolves the contemporary in the virtual gaming environment. A contemporary, acting out the events, appears in the form of bricolage, multiple images demonstrating strategies of both personal and group behavior. In the virtual interface, time becomes human-sized, allowing in others to see themselves. The space-time boundaries of the virtual form of gamification of existence negate the authenticity of real life, replacing and displacing it with experimental simulation that forms dependence. (shrink)

The discrepancy between children’s actual amount of viewing time and parents’ accounts of their concerns, rules, and parental mediation choices has been documented in empirical research, and typically interpreted through the lens of the Uses and Gratifications theory – showing how parents change their attitudes towards screen media in order to satisfy their own needs. Based on a qualitative longitudinal research project, including app-based media diaries, with 20 families with at least one child aged eight or younger, we aim to (...) make two contributions to the literature. With regard to theory, we aim to highlight the heterogeneous and contingent ways of balancing the place of digital media in children’s lives that arise from parents navigating screen time discourses, social pressures, and daily schedules. With regard to methods, we argue for the combination of qualitative data and app-based media diaries to contextualise and interpret potential discrepancies between reported screen time and parental anxieties or hopes about digital media. (shrink)

The paper examines both the phenomenology of the manic self as well as critical aspects of manic neurobiology, focusing, with respect to both domains, on manic temporality. We argue that the distortions of lived time in mania exceed mere acceleration and are fundamental for manic affectivity. Mania involves radical acceleration and radical asynchronicity, which result in an instantaneous existence. People with mania rebel against the facticity of reality and suffer from an existential leap towards the future, in which the (...) self abandons normal temporal boundaries. Excerpts from the interviews with persons with mania who experienced psychosis illustrate this phenomenon. Commenting upon disrupted circadian rhythms in mania and the role of lithium in its treatment the paper posits manic temporality as the link through which manic phenomenology and manic neurobiology intertwine. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts denying that temporal passage is an objective feature of reality face an explanatory challenge with respect to why it appears to us as though time passes. Recently, two solutions have surfaced. Cognitive illusionism claims that people experience the passage of time due to their belief that time passes. Cognitive error theory claims that we do not experience the passage of time, but hold the belief that we do, which we have acquired through making an inference from (...) the prior belief that time passes. These approaches suppose that belief and passage experience are explanatorily connected, and they depend on the claims that people who experience the passage of time or at least believe that they do also believe that time passes. To test these claims, we probed the beliefs of populations of individuals with depression and schizotypy, thus conditions that are strongly associated with alterations in temporal phenomenology. Depression was assessed with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and schizotypy with the short Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences (O-LIFE). While cognitive illusionism and inferentialist cognitive error theory would predict a strong association between BDI and O-LIFE scores and beliefs about time passage, our study found no such association. The experience of passage does not seem to be explanatorily connected to beliefs about the passage of time. (shrink)

The paper examines both the phenomenology of the manic self as well as critical aspects of manic neurobiology, focusing, with respect to both domains, on manic temporality. We argue that the distortions of lived time in mania exceed mere acceleration and are fundamental for manic affectivity. Mania involves radical acceleration and radical asynchronicity, which result in an instantaneous existence. People with mania rebel against the facticity of reality and suffer from an existential leap towards the future, in which the (...) self abandons normal temporal boundaries. Excerpts from the interviews with persons with mania who experienced psychosis illustrate this phenomenon. Commenting upon disrupted circadian rhythms in mania and the role of lithium in its treatment the paper posits manic temporality as the link through which manic phenomenology and manic neurobiology intertwine. (shrink)

The article presents Erwin W. Straus’ unpublished manuscript “Temporal Horizons” from 1952. In the paper, in addition to an extensive philosophical discussion with St. Augustine, Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, Straus elaborates on his idea of a unified view of temporal experience, comprising both the personal and the impersonal dimensions of time. The manuscript also contains an interview with a psychotic patient, which is supposed to exemplify Straus' core idea on the psychotic temporal experience, according to which (...) the break of the invisible bond between immanent or personal, and clock or impersonal time leads to a loss of a sense of reality. (shrink)

There are two main camps in 20th-century philosophy of time: A-theorists who believe in the dynamic model of reality, and B-theorists who maintain a static model of reality. After the publication of Putnam’s influential article, “time and physical geometry”, the implications of the Special Theory of Relativity became serious in metaphysical discussions about temporal reality. Some philosophers argued that this theory contradicts the dynamic model and implies the ontology of the static model, namely, the objective (...) class='Hi'>reality of the present, past and future events. In response, some advocates of the dynamic model argued that there can be dynamic models in relativistic setting, though they are different, radically, from old theories of dynamic reality. In this paper, first, I shall discuss how special relativity contradicts the traditional dynamic model and, then, how new dynamic models imply a relative concept of reality, in contrast to its old absolute concept and, so, why these strategies are very unintuitive. Finally, I shall argue that this radical conceptual shift about reality is, not only unintuitive, but unwarranted and, in some sense, inconsistent as well. (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)

The question of what exists is often seen as one of the metaphysician’s primary concerns—an ontological stance is a central and basic component of a great many positions in metaphysics. Consider, in particular, the debate surrounding the metaphysics of time: the question of whether non-present entities exist is typically thought of as one of the fundamental issues at stake in the debate, with each position on the nature of time consisting in part of an answer to this question of ontology. (...) My purpose in this paper will be to raise some worries about this focus on ontology, and to sketch an alternative approach to conceptualizing the debate—one that I think can help us get a clearer and deeper understanding of the fundamental issues at stake. I’ll focus in particular on the case of time and the ontology of non-present objects, but the framework I present is ultimately meant to apply more broadly to a range of debates involving ontology. On the framework I propose, the basic question at stake in this and other analogous debates is the following: Of the various perspectives we might adopt on reality, which perspective is fundamental? I’ll explain what this means and how it can help us reconceptualize the relevant metaphysical issues. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to offer a reading of Reinhart Koselleck’s work as an ally of critical theory. My contention is that, despite customary accusations of Koselleck being an anti-Enlightenment historian detrimental to social criticism and emancipatory politics, his investigations on the semantic fabric of modern society may actually expand our resources for the critique of domination. In order to make this argument plausible, I reconstruct some antinomies that are at the basis of Koselleck’s work (state/society, language/ (...) class='Hi'>reality, experience/expectation) and discuss their critical potential. This analysis shows that, rather than a rejection of the spirit of critique, Koselleck contributes to the temporalization of the practice of critique as such: namely, a clarification of the contradictions and potentials of a reflexive practice imbued in the struggle between the need to comprehend the world as it is and the right to experiment with other forms of life. (shrink)

The theory of relativity is often regarded as inhospitable to the idea that there is an objective passage of time in the world. In light of this, many philosophers and physicists embrace a “block universe” view, according to which change and temporal passage are merely a subjective appearance or illusion. My aim in this paper is to argue against such a view, and show that we can make sense of an objective passage of time in the setting of relativity (...) theory by abandoning the assumption that the now must be global, and re-conceiving temporal passage as a purely local phenomenon. Various versions of local becoming have been proposed in the literature. Here I focus on the causal diamond theory proposed by Steven F. Savitt and Richard Arthur, which models the now in terms of a local structure called a causal diamond. After defending the reality of temporal passage and exploring its compatibility with relativity theory, I show how the causal diamond approach can be used to counter the argument for the ideality of time due to Kurt Gödel, based on his “rotating universe” solution to the Einstein field equations. I defend the second component of his argument, the modal step, against the consensus view that finds it wanting, and reject the first step, showing that the Gödel universe is compatible with an objective passage of time as long as the latter is construed locally, along the lines of the causal diamond approach. (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)

The reality of spirits? A historiography of the Akan concept of 'mind' (La réalité des esprits: Vers une historiographie de la conception akan de l'esprit). In this article the following thesis is considered: the classifications used to define African Indigenous Religions are 'inventions' of Western scholars of religion who employ categories that are entirely "non-indigenous". The author investigates the presumptions of this statement and discusses the work of scholars of religion studying the Akan and in particular the Akan concept (...) of mind. In the analytic philosophical tradition the precise meaning of Akan concepts of mind such as okra and sunsum, described by various scholars of religion in different eras, are reviewed. The pre-colonial, colonial and the postcolonial era all have had specific influence on the conceptualisation of the mind. On the basis of an historiography of the Akan mind the author concludes that, contrary to the originally thesis under review, 'cultural background' and 'academic discipline' are relatively unimportant in the classification of 'indigenous religions'. The 'paradigm' prevailing within a discipline , 'personal belief' and the spatio-temporal context in which conceptualisations are created, turn out to be far more significant. (shrink)

I argue for a version of tense-logical realism that privileges tensed facts without privileging any particular temporal standpoint from which they obtain.

This chapter discusses the Huayan Buddhism of Li Tongxuan. At the core of his Buddhism is the claim that sentient beings are equipped with exactly the same qualities as the Buddha. In his analysis of the 80-fascicle version of the Huayan Jing, Li claims that Huayan teaching is a subitist teaching that proposes the awakening in this lifetime. In this context, unlike “orthodox” Huayan thinkers, Li claims that the chapter “Entering the Realm of Reality” is the core of the (...) Huayan Jing and that Sudhana’s pilgrimage in this chapter demonstrates the importance of practice as opposed to theorization.I address these issues by examining Li’s concept of time, which I identify as “non-temporality.” In the first section, I discuss non-temporality in connection with the Buddhist themes of existence and non-existence and Li’s doctrinal classification. In the second, I address Li’s discussion of nature-arising and subitism. In the third, I discuss Li’s comparative interpretation of Sudhana in the Huayan Jing and the Dragon Girl in the Lotus Sūtra. I conclude with a consideration of the ontological and existential implications of Li’s Huayan phenomenology. (shrink)

Psychosocial studies is a putatively ‘new’ or emerging field concerned with the irreducible relation between psychic and social life. Genealogically, it attempts to re-suture a tentative relation between mind and social world, individual and mass, internality and externality, norm and subject, and the human and non-human, through gathering up and re-animating largely forgotten debates that have played out across a range of other disciplinary spaces. If, as I argue, the central tenets, concepts and questions for psychosocial studies emerge out of (...) a re-appropriation of what have become anachronistic or ‘useless’ concepts in other fields – ‘the unconscious’, for instance, in the discipline of psychology – then we need to think about transdisciplinarity not just in spatial terms but also in temporal terms. This may involve engaging with theoretical ‘embarrassments’, one of which – the notion of ‘psychic reality’ – I explore here. (shrink)

This article recapitulates and develops the attempts in the Nietzschean traditions to address and overcome the proliferation of nihilism that Nietzsche predicted to unfold in the next 200 years (WP 2). Nietzsche approached nihilism not merely as a psychology but as a labyrinthic and pervasive historical process whereby the highest values of culture and founding assumptions of philosophical thought prevented the further flourishing of life. Therefore, he thought nihilism had to be encountered and experienced on many, often opposing, fronts to (...) be fully consumed and left behind. Thus, just as Nietzsche captured the subtle reinventions of nihilism in new forms in his time, in the new doers assumed behind new deeds (WP 488), this article focuses on the contemporary tectonic shifts brought by digital technology and challenges subjectivation and narrativization of algorithmic will to power in human-like interfaces such as ChatGPT. Having identified philosophers and himself as the most advanced nihilists in their overvaluation of truth, in the 4th part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche grappled with the difficult, perhaps impossible, temporality of post-nihilistic historicity that oscillates between highest creativity and highest truths, especially in the sections entitled The Shadow and At Noon whereby he explored new temporal techniques to evade the relapses into temporal nihilisms of the notions of linear progress or eternity (TSZ, 4). By drawing on this juncture, this article offers ways to address transfigurations of nihilism behind new technological performances of subjectivity. The article points toward creative temporalities beyond narrativity and subjectivity insofar as the statistical operations and probabilistic estimations of language-models exceed grammatical construction of meaning. This multifaceted application of his thought on the contemporary ontic reality is necessary to perceive our comet's incalculable movement as a veritable ray of sunshine. (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)

The study of the meanings of temporal expressions in natural language can proceed in two ways. The first consists of borrowing an ontological theory concerning how time “really” is, and then showing how temporal expressions are interpreted in this model. Let us call this the physicalist approach. The other approach is to start off by studying the temporal presuppositions employed in the language, and defining a model as the structure which satisfies these conditions. This approach we shall (...) call the analytist approach. The two approaches share their goal, which is to provide a temporal model for natural language. However, they are driven by different motivations. The physicalist approach is ontology-driven. It views time as part of reality, and its structure as independent of linguistic considerations. It attempts to interpret the language in this model, possibly by adding assumptions about the language. The analytist approach, on the other hand, is language driven. It assumes that language “mirrors” reality to the extent in which it is describable in the language, and tries to define a temporal model based only on linguisticconsiderations. A theory is “complete”, in a sense, if it combines both approaches and its (analytist) language- driven model can be constructed in a (physicalist) ontology-driven structure. (shrink)

This essay shows how, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the relation between the protagonists can be seen as an insurmountable contrast between two different cultures – on the one hand, the “diurnal” and “rational” culture of Rome and, on the other hand, the “nocturnal” and “passionate” culture of Egypt –, but also as an opposition between two different ways of understanding the relation between illusion and reality, appearance and truth, and thus between theatre and life. More specifically, what emerges (...) is the awareness that art, embodied in Cleopatra’s beauty, constantly reminds us of the unredeemable finitude and transience of the human being, who is inevitably immersed in time. In this light, if art is able to become a manifestation of truth, the fact remains that such truth, as final sense, is something that art can “show”, but only to indicate its perpetually elusive character. It is indeed a truth which, like the indecipherable secret kept in the Mausoleum, cannot be “told” or “represented” once and for all. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to pick up the threads of a debate about the ontology of becoming in spacetime that was triggered by a provocative article published by Nicholas Maxwell in 1985. This debate is itself merely a recent episode in a long dialogue that goes back at least as far as the time of Parmenides and Heraclitus. Here is the question around which this debate centres: is change or becoming the distinguishing feature of the natural or physical (...) world, as suggested obscurely by Heraclitus and argued at length by Aristotle? Or is our usual uncritical belief in the reality of change the product of some sort of perceptual illusion or intellectual error, as believed by Parmenides and a small host of recent authors such as Gödel and Julian Barbour? I won’t be able to solve the whole of this momentous problem here. However, I intend both to set aside a few unwarranted assumptions which have for a long time dogged our thinking about the puzzle of becoming, and to assemble some tools which should aid in finding a solution to it. In particular, I will argue that we can do much better than is usually supposed in identifying structures which can both “live” within Minkowski spacetime and represent objective becoming. I shall also discuss whether such structures would necessarily contradict the Principle. (shrink)

Time has a highly unstable place between the objective and the subjective. On the one side, there are very well known philosophical arguments trying to show that time has only a subjective reality, even that it is merely a subjective epiphenomenon. On the other side, we are compelled to take points of view as non dispensable elements of reality, at least of a reality capable of containing beings like us. And points of view offer a world of (...) temporal entities existing in an objective way. Moreover, points of view themselves appear to be temporal entities among other temporal entities. We analyse both aspects of time. Our main focus will be McTaggart’s arguments against the reality of a fluent time, what he called temporal series of kind A. We will distinguish three very different arguments in McTaggart works. We analyse them in detail. And we reject their conclusive character. Our final target is to maintain that there is a room for fluent time in what is internal to points of view but external to the subjects adopting those points of view. (shrink)

The essays in this topical volume inquire into one of the most fundamental issues of philosophy and the cognitive and natural sciences: the riddle of time. The central feature is the tension between the experience and the conceptualization of time, reflecting an apparently unavoidable antinomy of subjective first-person accounts and objective traditional science. Is time based in the physics of inanimate matter, or does it originate in the operation of our minds? Is it essential for the constitution of reality, (...) or is it just an illusion? Issues of time, temporality, and nowness are paradigms for interdisciplinary work in many contemporary fields of research. The authors of this volume discuss profoundly the mutual relationships and inspiring perspectives. They address a general audience with academic background knowledge. (shrink)

The publication of Frege’s Begriffsschrift in 1879 forever altered the landscape for many Western philosophers. Here, Sebastian Rödl traces how the Fregean influence, written all over the development and present state of analytic philosophy, led into an unholy alliance of an empiricist conception of sensibility with an inferentialist conception of thought. -/- According to Rödl, Wittgenstein responded to the implosion of Frege’s principle that the nature of thought consists in its inferential order, but his Philosophical Investigations shied away from offering (...) an alternative. Rödl takes up the challenge by turning to Kant and Aristotle as ancestors of this tradition, and in doing so identifies its unacknowledged question: the relation of judgment and truth to time. Rödl finds in the thought of these two men the answer he urges us to consider: the temporal and the sensible, and the atemporal and the intelligible, are aspects of one reality and cannot be understood independently of one another. In demonstrating that an investigation into the categories of the temporal can be undertaken as a contribution to logic, Rödl seeks to transform simultaneously our philosophical understanding of both logic and time. (shrink)

Università degli Studi di Milano.I propose to consider the paradox of temporal becoming using conceptual instruments derived from Lewis’ definition of intrinsic change. I will show that there are two possible solutions to this paradox, that the two solutions are conceptually incompatible and that they both solve the paradox at the cost of doing without temporal becoming. The problem I want to raise is: how should we consider temporal becoming? I suppose that, given these premises, the most (...) obvious answer is that temporal becoming is unreal: the paradox of temporal becoming is a demonstration of the impossibility of temporal becoming; there are, of course, two different and competing models of the nature of time , but they both exclude the reality of temporal change. I propose a different answer: temporal becoming is conceptually inaccessible, the paradox concerns our conceptual abilities, not reality in itself and the two possible solutions to the paradox of time reveal two possible conceptual attitudes towards a conceptually unattainable reality. (shrink)

During recovery from psychosis (diagnosed as schizophrenia) things must often be done slower than normally expected. The tempo of the socially shared reality is often experienced as being too fast for the recovering person. We will describe how this impairment stems from the pre-reflective mental structure underlying psychosis and how it can be transferred into an active skill supporting recovery, often including social retreat. In this paper, co-written by a psychiatrist and a person experienced in psychosis (= participatory health (...) research), we will draw on personal experiences, (participatory) qualitative research and first-hand accounts for our arguments. We will sketch out the process and three crucial building blocks of recovery: laid-back situations, switch-off skills, places to talk. We will then describe the acquired skill of slowing-down as an amalgam of the building blocks ‘switch-off skill’ and ‘laid-back situation’, since slowing-down answers the situation in a laid-back manner and enforces a slow behavioral pace on it. While this might be okay in private and in some situations shared with others (i.e. during serene situations), it may be tantalizing for others in many everyday situations resulting in stigma or exclusion (i.e. during work). Slowing-down therefore challenges the surrounding others and demonstrates the necessity to synchronize private and public tempos. This is most challenging while living in two realities at once, being the second and often a long-lasting stage of recovery (stage of double realities). (shrink)

This paper argues that A-determinations (past, present, and future) and B-relations (simultaneity and succession) have the same empirical status in that they are all neither historically discoverable nor sensible, but are detectable and are detectable in the same way. This constitutes a reason for thinking they are in the same class with respect to objectivity, contrary to the Russellian view that “in a world in which there was no experience there would be no past, present, or future, but there might (...) well be earlier and later.” The argument is developed to furnish an explanation of how in fact (and contra McTaggart) we are “immediately certain of the reality of time,” the explanation being that we detect time. (shrink)

Experience is the most primitive kind of intentional contact with reality. Metaphysical inquiry is one of the heights of human thought. It would not be surprising if experience was often silent on metaphysics, failing to offer support to one metaphysical disputant over the other, forcing them to fall back on nonexperiential considerations. I argue that the dispute between A- and B-theorists about time is a dispute about which experience is silent. B-theorists have typically conceded that the manifest image of (...) time conflicts with how time turns out to be, on their own view of time. They have offered an array of accounts of why that conflict should not worry us. I argue here that these accounts are unconvincing. I also argue that they are unnecessary. Nothing about how time is experienced conflicts with B-theory. An independently plausible method for discovering what properties experience represents—the method of phenomenal contrast—implies that experience does not favor A-theory over B-theory. (shrink)

Within the philosophy of time there has been a growing interest in positions that deny the reality of time. Those positions, whether motivated by arguments from physics or metaphysics, have a shared conclusion: time is not real. What has not been made wholly clear, however, is exactly what it entails to deny the reality of time. Time is unreal, sure. But what does that mean? There has been only one sustained attempt to spell out exactly what it would (...) mean to endorse a temporal error theory; a theory that denies the reality of time—Baron & Miller’s ‘What is temporal error theory?’. Despite the fact that their paper makes significant strides in spelling out what would be required of a temporal error theory, my claim in this paper is that their position must be rejected and replaced. As well as looking to reject Baron and Miller’s position, I also look to provide that replacement. (shrink)