Abstract
Wholly apart from its manifestation in human language, the reality of tense is experienced by us in a variety of ways which are so evident and so pervasive that the belief in the objective reality of past, present, and future and in the passage of time is a universal feature of human experience. Phenomenological analyses of temporal consciousness carried out by philosophers have emphasized the centrality of A-determinations to our experience of time. In his classic phenomenology of time consciousness, Edmund Husserl described our experience of time in terms of retentions of the past and protentions of the future, both anchored in the “now.” We experience on the one hand a sort of “flowing away” (Ablaufsphänomene) consisting of the recession of experience from the “now” into the past: “...this now apprehension is, as it were, the nucleus of a comet’s tail of retentions referring to the earlier now-points of the motion.”1 But we also protend the future in that we anticipate and live toward that which is to come. The transformation of now-consciousness to consciousness of the past and its replacement by a new now-consciousness, says Husserl, “is part of the essence of time consciousness.”2 Thus, our differing attitudes toward the past and future, as well as our apprehension of temporal becoming are constitutive of time consciousness: ”The immanent contents are what they are only so far as during their ‘actual’ duration they refer ahead to something futural and back to something past.... In each primal phase which primordially constitutes the immanent content we have retentions of the preceding and protentions of the coming phases of precisely this content....” 3
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References
Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. Martin Heidegger, trans. James S. Churchill, with an Introduction by Calvin O. Schrag ( Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1964 ), p. 52
For a discussion of the importance of Husserl’s work, see J. N. Findlay, “Husserl’s Analysis of the Inner Time-Consciousness,” Monist 59 (1975): 3–20
Peter K. McInerney, Time and Experience (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), esp. chap. 5.
William Friedman, About Time ( Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990 ), p. 92.
Steven F. Savitt, “The Direction of Time,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (1996): 348.
Paul Norwich, Asymmetries in Time ( Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987 ), p. 15.
J. J. C. Smart, “The Reality of the Future,” Philosophia 10 (1981): 141.
Robert C. Coburn, The Strangeness of the Ordinary: Problems and Issues in Contemporary Metaphysics ( Savage, Maryland: Rowan & Littlefield, 1990 ), p. 118.
Wm. Godfrey-Smith, critical notice of Real Time, by D. H. Mellor, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (1983): 109.
D. H. Mellor, Real Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 6. Oaklander concurs, stating that “it is necessary for the detenser to deal adequately with the experience of temporal becoming” if the ineliminability of tensed discourse is to be compatible with time’s being tenseless (L. Nathan Oaklander, “On the Experience of Tenseless Time,” Journal of Philosophical Research 18 [ 1993 ]: 160 )
See Alvin Plantinga, “Reason and Belief in God,” in Faith and Philosophy,ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), p. 48. Plantinga does not think of propositions as tenseless and indexical-free. But if, in accordance with the distinctions drawn in the last chapter we distinguish propositions from beliefs, I do not see that anything is lost from his account by construing a noetic structure in terms of one’s beliefs, which are indisputably tensed, and benignly neglecting propositions.
Ibid., pp. 59–60. Cf. Alvin Plantinga, “Self-Profile,” in Alvin Plantinga,ed. James Tomberlin and Peter Van Inwagen, Profiles 5 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), p. 63, where he endorses the insight of Thomas Reid that the deliverances of sense perception do not need justification in terms of other sources of belief: “there is nothing epistemically defective or improper in accepting its deliverances as basic.”
For further development of Plantinga’s views on the conditions requisite for knowledge, as well as his critique of the competing theories of deontologism, coherentism, and reliablism, see Alvin Plantinga, Warrant: the Current Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) and idem, Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 ). My argument in this chapter is independent of one’s specific construal of warrant and should be acceptable to advocates of all camps.
For his analysis of extrinsic and intrinsic defeaters, see Alvin Plantinga, “The Foundations of Theism: a Reply,” Faith and Philosophy 3 (1986): 306
Gilbert Plumer, “Detecting Temporalities,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (1987): 453. In the Aristotelian tradition unity, number, and existence were thought of as transcendentals because they are entailed by the predication of a property in any of the ten categories. The conception of presentness as a transcendental, non-sensible property is especially plausible if we adopt an A-theoretical, presentist ontology in which presentness just is existence. For discussion, see Quentin Smith, The Felt Meanings of the World (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1986), pp. 168–175. Contra Plumer, the best argument for presentness’s not being a sensible property is that mental events can be observed via introspection to be present and that in a way indistinguishable from the presentness of external events.
In D. H. Mellor, “MacBeath’s Soluble Aspirin,” Ratio 25 (1983): 92. Oaklander, “Experience of Tenseless Time,” p. 161, re-iterates Mellor’s position.
See also Quentin Smith, “Williams’s Defense of the New Tenseless Theory of Time,” in The New Theory of Time, ed. Q. Smith and L. Oaklander ( New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994 ), pp. 112–113.
A. N. Prior, “Thank Goodness That’s Over,” Philosophy 34 (1959): 17.
Murray MacBeath, “Mellor’s Emeritus Headache,” Ratio 25 (1983): 84: so also Brian Garrett, —Thank Goodness That’s Over’ Revisited,“ Philosophical Quarterly 38 (1988): 202.
See good discussion in Hestevold, “Passage and the Presence of Experience,” p. 546; MacBeath, “Mellor’s Headache,” p. 84. Gallois attempts to undercut what he calls the “attitude asymmetry thesis” by imagining time travel scenarios in which I prefer the pain to be future, not past (André Gallois, “Asymmetry in Attitudes and the Nature of Time,” Philosophical Studies 76 [19941: 63–64). But Gallois fails to appreciate that in the time traveler’s proper time, one always prefers the disvalued experiences to be past. Proper time is emphatically not merely subjective time. 5f Mellor, “MacBeath’s Aspirin,” p. 91.
See George Schlesinger, “The Stillness of Time and Philosophical Equanimity,” Philosophical Studies 30 (1976): 145–159; idem, Aspects of Time (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1980), pp. 34–39, 138–139; idem, “How Time Flies,” Mind 91 (1982): 501–523. A corrective is in order, however, with respect to Schlesinger’s contention that a literally moving “now” is a necessary condition of the rationality of our tense-related feelings. Absolute becoming is necessary, but it goes too far to specify that such becoming takes the metaphysical shape of a “now” which literally moves along the B-series of events. The feeling of relief is rational only if an event which was present no longer is; but whether that event existed before becoming present and exists after ceasing to be present is a further metaphysical question, which I discuss in my The Tenseless Theory of Time: a Critical Examination,Synthèse Library (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, forthcoming).
J. R. Lucas, A Treatise on Time and Space ( London: Methuen, 1973 ), pp. 313–314.
Schlesinger, Aspects of Time,p. 37. See also discussion by Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation and the Continuum (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 174–179. One must disagree, however, with Schlesinger’s claim that the B-theorist is rational to feel certain emotions about present events, since for the B-theorist there is no present and so no grounds for rejoicing that something is occurring now.
Schlesinger, Aspects of Time,pp. 38, 138. David Cockburn emphasizes, “really to live in accordance with the insight that `all times and what happens at them, are equally real’… would… involve radical modifications in the ways in which most of us now live” (Other Times,Cambridge Studies in Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], p. 22; cf. pp. 135–140).
Ibid., p. 157; similarly J. M. Shorter, “The Reality of Time,” Philosophia 14 (1984): 338, who, after asserting that the “special nature” of the difference between before and after justifies our different attitudes, asks if it is necessary at such a fundamental level to say anything further on the matter.
Grünbaum, Philosophical Problems of Space and Time,pp. 209–210, 314–315.
Lawrence Sklar, Space, Time, and Spacetime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), section F of Chapter V. Cf. Lawrence Sklar, “Time in Experience and in Theoretical Description of the World,” in Time’s Arrows Today, ed. Steven F. Savitt ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 ), pp. 217–229.
On the pseudo-scientific claims of socio-biology, see Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature ( Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985 ).
Huw Price, Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 14–15
Steven F. Savitt, “The Replacement of Time,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72 (1994): 467.
Alvin Plantinga, “An Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism,” Logos 12 (1991): 27–49.
See the interesting Auseinandersetzung between Delmas Kiernan-Lewis, “Not Over Yet: Prior’s `Thank Goodness’ Argument,” Philosophy 66 (1991): 241–243
L. Nathan Oaklander, “Thank Goodness It’s Over,” Philosophy 67 (1992): 256–258
J. D. Kiernan-Lewis, “The Rediscovery of Tense: A Reply to Oaklander,” Philosophy 69 (1994): 231–233.
A point originally obliquely made by Richard Gale, “`Here’ and `Now’,” Monist 53 (1969): 409.
George Schlesinger, “The Similarities between Space and Time,” Mind 84 (1975): 164.
A point made by Gilbert Plumer, “Detecting Temporalities,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (1987): 459. In private correspondence (George N. Schlesinger to William L. Craig, 5 October 1993), Schlesinger complains that the example in the text “shows only that one needs consciousness or awareness of the magnitude of the interval.” But clearly mere consciousness of the length of a temporal interval does not yield the experience of waiting.
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Craig, W.L. (2000). Our Experience of Tense. In: The Tensed Theory of Time. Synthese Library, vol 293. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9345-8_5
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