Making Sense of Subjective Time

KronoScope, 2017

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).

Consciousness and Cognition, 2019

Research on the mental representation of time ('subjective time') has provided broad insights into the nature of time perception and temporal processing. As the field comprises different scientific disciplines, such as psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience, studies differ with regard to the basic terms and concepts used. For this reason, research on subjective time lacks a coherent conceptual system. We argue that research in the field of subjective time should aim at establishing such a system, i.e., a more standardized terminology, in order to strengthen its theoretical basis and to support an efficient communication of results. Based on key empirical findings and concepts that are commonly (but inconsistently) used in the literature, we argue for a conceptual framework for the study of subjective time that differentiates between three types of mental representations of time: basic temporal processing, time perception in terms of passage, and time perception in terms of duration.

This thesis argues that the actuality of time differs from our perception of time. When we talk of time, we are describing a representation of a form of change or motion. Generally, the properties of nature that people describe when they talk of time are properties of change, duration, persistence and succession. These properties are sufficiently different from our perception of time to suggest that our perception of time is describing change in our consciousness and not change in the world.

T. Teo (ed.) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Dordrecht and New York: Springer. Online Springer Reference:, 2014

There are several intertwined debates in the area of contemporary philosophy of time. One field of inquiry is the nature of time itself. Presentists think that only the present moment exists whereas eternalists believe that all of (space-)time exists on a par. The second main field of inquiry is the question of how objects persist through time. The endurantist claims that objects are three-dimensional wholes, which persist by being wholly present, whereas the perdurantist thinks that objects are four- dimensional and that their temporal parts are the bearers of properties. The third debate in the field of contemporary philosophy of time is about tense- versus tenseless theory. Tensers are at odds with detensers about the status of the linguistic reference to the present moment.

Crítica (México D. F. En línea), 2017

Carlos Montemayor, Minding Time: A Philosophical and TheoreticalApproach to the Psychology of Time, Brill, Leiden, 2013, xiv +154 pp.

Review of Philosophy and Psychology of Time

Springer eBooks, 1977

The Personal experience of time. (Emotions, personality, and psychotherapy) "Most of the chapters in this volume had their origins as papers presented at the Eighth Annual Conference of the Center for Research in Cognition and Affect of the City University of New York •.• May 30, 1975." Includes bibliographies and index. 1. Time-Psychological aspects-Congresses. 2. Cognition-Congresses. 3. Child psychology-Congresses. 4. Psychological research-Congresses. I.

Do we perceive time? Is time real? Time has been the subject of inquiry in science, philosophy and religion through the ages. To understand time has been a difficult problem and history is testament to attempts made by scholars to understand and define time. Albert Einstein said that “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once”. Time is an instrument that separate things and allows a smooth flow of everything. One view of the philosophers is that time is the fundamental part of the design of the universe and events flow through it in a sequence. Another view is to not consider time as a container of events. Time instead is part of the intellectual structure. Immanuel Kant holds the view that time is not a thing or event and it cannot be measured. Scientist Sean Carroll is trying to understand how time works. He is interested in the ‘arrow of time’. It gives us a feeling of progression or rather it conveys the animation and flow of time. This paper is an effort to investigate the perception of time and to discover the subjective experience and psychological aspect of time as an abstract phenomenon and it is not associated with any specific sense. How we perceive time through the sequence of events, what is brain time and how brain constructs the perception, how mind can travel into the structure of memory, how imagination is able to speculate the future, these are some of the questions I have attempted to answer in my paper. The perception of time encompass areas like duration, body clock, specious present, time perception in animals, aging and effects of meditation.