Brain Time and Phenomenological Time

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511610608.006

5 - Brain Time and Phenomenological Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2010

Rick Grush

Edited by

Andrew Brook and

Kathleen Akins

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Rick Grush: Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Philosophy, UCSD
Andrew Brook: Affiliation:
Carleton University, Ottawa
Kathleen Akins: Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University, British Columbia

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Summary

As 'tis from the disposition of visible and tangible objects we receive the idea of space, so from the succession of ideas and impressions we form the idea of time.

– David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

… space and time … are … pure intuitions that lie a priori at the basis of the empirical… . [T]hey are mere forms of our sensibility, which must precede all empirical intuition, or perception of actual objects.

– Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics

… there are cases in which on the basis of a temporally extended content of consciousness a unitary apprehension takes place which is spread out over a temporal interval (the so-called specious present)…. That several successive tones yield a melody is possible only in this way, that the succession of psychical processes are united “forthwith” in a common structure.

– Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Inner Time-Consciousness

Introduction

The topic of this chapter is temporal representation. More specifically, I intend to provide an outline of a theory of what it is that our brains do (at the subpersonal level) such that we experience (at the personal level) certain aspects of time in the way that we do. A few words about both sides of this relation are in order.

First, the brain. I will actually be making little substantive contact with neurophysiology.

Type: Chapter
Information: Cognition and the Brain
The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement
, pp. 160 - 207

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511610608.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2005

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