Temporal Consciousness

The course provides students with an introduction to the place of the philosophy of temporal experience within the philosophy of mind (in particular the philosophy of modes, contents and intentionality) and its relations to the metaphysics of time. It looks first at the relations between perception and the present, memory and the past, expectation and the future, the theory of indexicality, body consciousness and then at the relations between folk-psychology and the B-theory.  Among the questions to be discussed are: What is the relation between the time of experience and the time of the objects of experience? Is the concept of the past an indexical concept? Is there non-conceptual awareness of the past?  Are there temporal perspectives? Are philosophers of time and of time-consciousness systematically misled by linguistic pictures? Is the distinction between the present and the past mind-dependent or organism-dependent?

Reading

Dainton, B. “Temporal Consciousness”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Findlay, J. N. 1941 “Time: A Treatment of some puzzles”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 19,3, 216-235.

Mellor, D. H. 1998. Real Time II. London: Routledge.

Philipps, I. 2014 The temporal structure of experience, in D. Lloyd and V. Arstila (eds.) Subjective Time: the Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality MIT.

Sattig, T. 2006. The Language and Reality of Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.