Broad’s Accounts of Temporal Experience

Two extremely detailed accounts of temporal experience can be found in the work of C. D. Broad. These accounts have been subject to considerable criticism. I argue that, when we look more carefully at Broad’s work, we find that much of this criticism fails to find its target. I show that the objection that ultimately proves troubling for Broad stems from his commitment to two principles: i) the Thin-PSA, and ii) the ‘Overlap’ claim. I use this result to demonstrate that we can learn two extremely important lessons from Broad’s work on temporal experience. The first lesson is that there is a structural problem facing any account that commits to these two principles. This is significant given that a number of recent accounts of temporal experience are so committed.The second lesson is that the problem facing these accounts stems only from commitment to the Thin-PSA and ‘Overlap’, rather than to commitment to a particular conception of how experiences are to be individuated. This, I argue, gives us reason to reject Tye’s recent claim that the problems facing accounts of temporal experience can be dissolved simply by making stipulations about how experiences are to be individuated. References C. D. Broad. Scientific Thought. Routledge & K. Paul, London, 1923.C. D. Broad. An Examination of McTaggart’s philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1927.C. D. Broad. The philosophy of C. D. Broad. Open Court Pub Co, 1959.T. Clarke. Seeing Surfaces and Physical Objects. In M. Black, editor, Philosophy in America, pages 98–114. George Allen and Unwin, London, 1965.B. Dainton. Time and Space. McGill Queens University Press, Montreal, 2001.B. Dainton. Time in Experience: Reply to Gallagher. Psyche, 9(10), 2003.B. Dainton. Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience. Routledge, London, 2nd edition, 2006.J. Foster. The Case for Idealism. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1982.S. Gallagher. Sync-Ing in the Stream of Experience. PSYCHE, 9:10, 2003.S. Gallagher and D. Zahavi. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. Routledge, London, 2008.E. Husserl. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917). Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1991.F. Jackson. Perception: A Representative Theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977.W. James. The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1. Cosimo Classics, New York, 2007.S. D Kelly. The Puzzle of Temporal Experience. In A. Brook and K. Akins, editors, Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement, pages 208–240. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005.R. Le Poidevin. The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation. Oxford University Press, USA, 2007.J. D. Mabbott. I. Our Direct Experience of Time. Mind, 60(238): 153–167, 1951.http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mind/LX.238.153M. Martin. Perception. In The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy (Ed. F. Jackson & M. Smith). Oxford University Press, USA, 2008. I. Miller. Husserl, Perception, and Temporal Awareness. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1984.I. Phillips. Perceiving Temporal Properties. European Journal of Philosophy, 18(2):176–202, 2010.http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0378.2008.00299.xB. Russell. Theory of Knowledge. Routledge, London, 1992.M. Soteriou. Perceiving Events. Philosophical Explorations, 13(3): 223–241, 2010.http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2010.501904T. L. S. Sprigge. American Truth and British Reality. Open Court Pub. Co., LaSalle, Ill., 1993.M. Tye. Consciousness and Persons. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, 2003.D. Zahavi. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2003