Time Continuum and Time Consciousness

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Cord Friebe
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2020 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 446878312

We experience time as a continuous flow in which the present is distinguished in various ways, for instance as the dividing-point between the open future and the unchangeable past. Yet, from Zeno’s paradoxes to Einstein’s theory of relativity the philosophy of time has encountered the challenge of finding a place for temporal passage within the objective world. The reconciliation of the metaphysics of time with temporal experience is hence a desideratum of the philosophy of time, in particular in the contemporary analytic tradition.For a long time the prominent view was to find a place for the experience of time in the block universe. Recently, however, there has been a renaissance of dynamical views, such as the Growing Block Theory according to which the future is non-existent, whereas new present slices of existence continuously come into being (and remain into existence). These theories have been shown to be even compatible with contemporary physics. The main motivation for such dynamical views consists in their being better capable to explain our experience of time. According to the thesis of this project, even the most promising versions of such views are nonetheless faced with a problem: accounting for the continuity of temporal experience. The objective present has no immediate successor; it cannot really pass.The aim of the project is therefore to save the temporal continuum. To achieve this aim, revisionary ontologies have been proposed elsewhere: for instance, by introducing extended processes at the fundamental level or through the appeal to irreducible dispositions. The central idea of the project is to draw on Kant’s account of time as a pure intuition to solve the problem of temporal continuity. This account leads to a conception of the continuum which differs in many important respects from the Cantorean set-theoretic one presupposed by the contemporary debate. Moreover, intuition is for Kant a form of conscioussness. Hence, the resulting view explains temporal continuity by making it dependent upon the subject.Considering subjective time as a condition for the possibility of experience (and of the objects of experience) means to trace the objective temporal-continuum back to subjective consciousness. This contrasts the usual contemporary view according to which the subjective experience of time is made explanatory dependent upon an objective temporal passage. But how is the temporal continuum dependent upon consciousness? How does consciousness turn the subjective present into an objective one?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants