Time, Consciousness Of
William James's discussion of the perception of time in Principles of Psychology (Vol. I, Ch. 15) provides a convenient starting point for a discussion of the "consciousness of time." James's main concern was to give an empiricist account of our temporal concepts. This is clear from the Lockean question with which he started: "What is the original of our experience of pastness, from whence we get the meaning of the term?" (p. 605) and from his answer that the "prototype of all conceived times is the specious present, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible" (p. 631). A contemporary empiricist might formulate James's thesis thus: that all other temporal concepts can be defined in terms of the relation "earlier than" and that this relation is sense given or can be ostensively defined so that even if a person does not use the term specious present, he is obliged to say that some earlier events are still, in some sense, present to us when we are sensing a later event.
Consider why James used the term specious present in describing such facts. He quoted with approval a passage by E. R. Clay, who invented this term; the quotation shows that they both assumed that the philosophically correct use of "present" is to refer to the boundary, conceived of as a durationless instant, between past and future.
This page contains 201 words.
Time, Consciousness Of article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 4,975 words
(approx. 17 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Consciousness Article
