Introduction: Time and Time Experience

Abstract

Temporal aspects dwell both in the world around us and at the core of our experience of it. Reality, thought, and language all seem to be imbibed in temporality at some level or another. It is thus not surprising that philosophers who have to face the problems of understanding time have resorted to tools from different spheres of investigation, and often at the points of overlap of these areas. Metaphysics, philosophy of physics and science in general, philosophy of language, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, the study of perception and cognition, but also anthropology, sociology, and history of culture, art, and ideas (and the list is surely far from complete) all contain theories and reflections that are crucial to our understanding and experience of time. Many recent debates in analytic philosophy have tackled in different ways the question of whether the sensation of the passage of time that seems to characterise our ordinary experience should be understood as reflecting some objective feature of reality (as the socalled A-theories of time usually maintain), or is rather a mere feature of our psychology (as is often claimed by the so-called B-theories of time). In this context, it is crucial to keep clear the distinction between the role of the metaphysical enterprise and the psychological enterprise (both broadly construed). On the one hand, a metaphysical claim that a certain temporal feature of our experience is not a genuine feature of reality requires a psychological justification of why we ordinarily think of it as part of reality; and on the other hand explanations of our experience of temporal reality depend on what we take temporal reality to be like. It thus seems that the answer to the question of what time is and the answer to the question of how our temporal experience works obtain support from each other. More importantly, they do not do so in a trivial way. As many of the following contributions highlight, no ‘‘easy’’ argument in favour of an A-theory can be made from the allegedly obvious fact that it provides the only plausible explanations of why our experience ‘‘feels’’ dynamic. The aim of this special issue of Topoi is to shed some light on the interplay between the analysis of reality of time and the analysis of our experience of time. To do so, we have selected original contributions that approach this crucial element in our understanding of time from different standpoints. Roughly speaking, the contributions can be seen as falling under four labels: the Metaphysics of Passage, the Experience of Passage, the Perception of Passage, and Temporal Passage and Physics. In the next four sections we briefly outline the content of the papers.