The Present vs the Specious Present

Authors: Jiri Benovsky

Publish Date: 2012/11/22

Volume: 4, Issue: 2, Pages: 193-203

PDF Link

Abstract

This article is concerned with the alleged incompatibility between presentism and specious present theories of temporal experience According to presentism the present time is instantaneous or nearinstantaneous while according to specious present theories the specious present is temporally extended—therefore it seems that there is no room in reality for the whole of a specious present if presentism is true It seems then that one of the two claims—presentism or the specious present theory—has to go I shall argue that this kind of worries is mislead Once we understand properly how our phenomenal experience as of passage and as of change such as it is understood by specious present theorists comes into being the apparent phenomenologicometaphysical conflict will disappear In short the mistake here is to presuppose that there is a link between phenomenology and metaphysics stronger than it actually is Presentism is a metaphysical theory about what exists Specious presentism is a phenomenological theory about how things appear to us in experience As we will see the two claims are not in conflict and are in fact entirely orthogonal

Keywords: