Abstract
In the philosophy of time the standard view on the present holds that it has no duration. The classic proponent of this view, St Augustine, claims that the present is the blade of a knife separating the future from the past. Despite its dominant position, this view might be questioned on both phenomenological and ontological grounds. An interesting attempt at accounting for the duration of the present can be found in Roman Ingarden’s analyses of temporal being. In his ontology Ingarden discerned two features that characterize present temporal objects - activeness and fissuration. The former outlines a distinctive quality of present temporal objects - their “fullness of being”: a complete qualitative determination and efficaciousness. The latter portrays a limitation to activeness - the actual, effective existence of temporal objects is restricted to their present being, it is only a “fissure” between the past and the future. But according to Ingarden this fissure might vary for different objects, which raises a question concerning the duration of the present. In this article, I point to some motifs that led to entertaining the possibility of a certain duration of the present - a non-zero value of the fissure. I also investigate the relation between the duration of the present of objects existing in time and their ontological structure. In the conclusion, I propose an outline of an ontological theory of relativity of the duration of the present inspired by Ingarden’s analyses.
