[SydPhil] Current Projects: Duration of the Specious Present

[Kristie Miller]

This Thursday’s current projects (3.00-4.30 in the Muniment Room) will be Maria Kon talking about:



The Duration of the Specious Present

What is the actual duration of the specious present?  To address the question, I survey definitions of ‘specious present’ that appear in recent philosophical literature on temporal experience.  After disentangling phenomenal duration(s) of the specious present from its actual duration, I show that the actual duration assumed in these definitions often relies on some notion of the actual present, i.e., the moment at which we have our specious experience.  This notion is either left vague—it doesn’t have an explicit length—or corresponds to one of the following two general positions: those that claim that the actual temporal sequence of events just needs to be divisible into instantaneous instants, and those that claim that this present does have a particular length.  There are two lengths for the latter camp: instantaneous and non-instantaneous.  I focus on evaluating the options in the latter camp and argue in favour of the instantaneous one.


See you all there.



Associate Professor Kristie Miller
Senior ARC Research Fellow
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and
The Centre for Time
The University of Sydney
Sydney Australia
Room 407, A 14

kmiller at usyd.edu.au
kristie_miller at yahoo.com
Ph: +612 9036 9663
http://www.kristiemiller.net/KristieMiller2/Home_Page.html














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