Time, Embodiment and the Self

This title was first published in 2000: Beginning with a sustained argument against the new tenseless theory of time and against McTaggart's A series/B series distinction, the author of this essay goes on to provide a non-paradoxical, tensed, phenomenologically-based account of the 'going on' or 'taking place' of events in time that escapes the paradoxes endemic to 'passage' as understood via the A series/B series distinction. The author then turns his attention to the other main aim of the essay, which is to seek an understanding of time adequate to those more 'embodied' conceptions of the self that place character, and with it the 'constitutive attachments' or 'ground projects' of individual life circumstance, at the centre of the self. This involves a 'redrawing' of the self informed by a wider conception of the will than the one we have inherited via Descartes and Kant, by an account of ground projects, and by the theory of the tripartite psyche in Plato's Republic. It also involves extending the account of time developed in the second chapter in a way that draws on the notion of 'ecstatic temporality' that originates with Heidegger. The essay will be of use to philosophers and advanced students interested in the nature of the self, time, temporality, and phenomenology.

Contents: McTaggart's Parody of time and the tenseless theory: Introduction; McTaggart's Language of time and its inconsistencies; Tenseless theory and the future; Tenseless theory and persisting things; Tenseless theory, temporal parts and 'Back to Quine'; The dynamic of time; Introduction; Experience and the present: a first look; The present and the just-past; The micro-structure of 'going on'; The time that flows, the time that abides; Unsaturatedness, significance, and the possibility of narrative; Concluding remarks; Redrawing the self: The self: an old agenda in outline; Aporetics of the Noumenal self; Kant and Sartre; The self and its 'objects'; Will and the Sartrean self; Reinstating character: a preliminary outline; The tripartite psyche in Plato's Republic; The self and its 'Logical Geography'; The time of the embodied self; Introduction;'Ground Projects' and their temporality; Sartre and ecstatic temporality; Ecstatic temporality and the intra-temporal 'I'; Concluding remarks; Bibliography; Index.