Consciousness and the Passage of Time

Geoffrey Lee
Philosophy
UC Berkeley

This book manuscript is about the unity of consciousness and the experience of time passing. The discussion in the book falls naturally into three parts. Part 1 offers an account of the part-whole structure of the stream of consciousness and the related idea of the “unity” of consciousness, both at a time and over time. Part 2 draws on this material to argue for a view of temporal experience (i.e. experience of features like duration and temporal order), a view similar in some ways to that proposed by Husserl. Part 3 discusses the alleged sense we have of an objective “moving present” that is often appealed to in discussions of the metaphysics of time, arguing that an Husserlian account of the kind presented in Part 2 can shed light on this mysterious form of experience.