Freud’s formal work on mourning would indicate that in order to be successful at it you must detach from your cathexis to the loved object; yet he said to the poet Hilda Doolittle that he remembered the last war year very well, as that year he lost his favourite daughter, Sophie, to the Spanish flu epidemic, but that, in fact, she was not lost. ‘“She is here”, he said, and he showed me a tiny locket he wore, fastened to his (...) watch chain’.The ‘blameless physician’ did not want to let go of Sophie and would have held a photograph in his hand many times every day as he checked the time, closed the locket, put it back into his pocket. This article investigates a social media site as that contemporary ‘pocket’ in which we might place a cherished photograph, thus the tension between the durational time of the artefact and the time-in-motion of the networked image. (shrink)

The time-lag argument forces us to acknowledge that all perception is perception of the past. While the spatial distance between the perceiver and the perceived typically is obvious, the temporal distance usually remains hidden from the perceiver. This temporal distance provides interesting challenges for Perceptual Realism. If objects and events in the world are presented to us as simultaneous with the experience, then the experience is illusory. If we deny that the past exists, then all perception is, like hallucination, perception (...) of something which does not exist. This chapter argues that there are, in fact, several time-lag arguments, and that their importance for philosophical theories of perception has been underestimated. It is argued that they provide important means of evaluating recent theories about perception. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 1, pp 1 - 18 This essay addresses time’s dissemination both in the sense of an undoing or fracturing of unifying conceptions of time, as well as in the sense of ‘scattering seeds’ by conceiving of manifold temporalizing configurations of living beings, things, and events without an overarching sense of time. After a consideration of traditional conceptions of time, this essay explores the notion of duration in Bergson in order to make it fruitful for (...) thinking duration without centering it in human consciousness. The author suggests that we can begin to think the temporal happening of things and events in terms of different temporal configurations of various degrees and qualities of complexity that may be occasioned by chance, whereby chance is understood as the freeing of time-spaces of indeterminacy in which temporal configurations take shape or manifest themselves. 1. (shrink)

Research into Bergson’s philosophy downplays a key development in his first work, Time and free will. It is there that Bergson explicitly opposes himself to Kant by arguing that succession is not a temporal concept, but a spatial one. This is the crucial point of departure for Bergson’s entire philosophy, one that allows him to radically dismiss Kant’s notion of freedom in favor of one based on duration and multiplicity. This text has two aims. Firstly to add to Bergson (...) scholarship by explicating the structure and force of Bergson’s initial argument against Kant, demonstrating that his engagement with Kant is much less incremental than has been suggested in secondary literature. Secondly, to reconstruct the consequences regarding freedom that Bergson immediately draws in departing from Kant, which illustrates the profundity and originality of his thought at the very inception of his oeuvre. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s later works are full of questions about the timing and duration of mental phenomena. These questions are often awkward ones, and Wittgenstein seems to take their awkwardness to be philosophically revealing, but if we ask what it is that these questions reveal then different interpretations are possible. This paper suggests that there are at least six different ways in which the timing of mental phenomena can be awkward. By identifying these we can give sense to some of Wittgenstein’s (...) more cryptic remarks, and doing this enables us to clarify some obscure elements in his picture of the mind, including the distinction between sensations and feelings, and his account of the rational status of those processes out of which rule-following is built. (shrink)

I use Jonathan Bennett’s, Gilles Deleuze’s and Pierre Macherey’s interpretations of Spinoza to extract a theory of time and duration from Spinoza. I argue that although time can be considered a product of the imagination, duration is a real property of existing things and corresponds to their essence, taking essence (as Deleuze does) as a degree of power of existing. The article then explores the relations among time, duration, essence and eternity, arguing against the idea that Spinoza’s (...) essences or Spinoza’s eternity are atemporal. Essences and eternity both involve necessary references to time, but the time involved is not that of the “fortuitous sequence of events” apprehended through sensory experience. Rather, the “time” is that implicit in the necessity of God’s self-determination through God’s differentiation into natura naturans and natura naturata, which is involved in the production and differentiation of eternal essences. (shrink)

One reason for the problematic status of the social sciences is that their claim to legitimacy has been undermined by two opposite models of inquiry: the nomothetic idea of science, with its emphasis on universal laws, and the idiographic conception of history as a record of particular events. It can be argued that both of them excluded the temporal dimension of socio-historical reality; more precisely, they were ill-equipped to analyze the unstable structures which emerge and undergo transformations over varying periods (...) of time. This previously excluded middle has been rediscovered by pioneering scientists on both sides of the divide; the paper compares Prigogine's critique of Newtonian natural science with Braudel's reorientation of history. The former line of argument privileges time, the latter duration, but they lead to similar conclusions. (shrink)

Frank Kermode uses the term aevum to question the links between origin, order, and time, associating experience with spatial form. Without end or beginning, aevum identifies an intersubjective order of time where we participate in the “relation between the fictions by which we order our world and the increasing complexity of what we take to be the ‘real’ history of that world”; being “in-between” time is a primary quality of the aevum. Regarding cinema, aevum identifies this third duration as (...) emotional experience, occuring as traumatic time. It facilitates thinking beyond lived temporal experience of everyday life to a philosophy of experience that accounts for alternative sensoria of time, similar to the traumatic encounter. The cinematic aevum is equally not of the material, corporeal world; concurrently associating human reality with the myths of the human condition. To say that a cinematic aevum exists following traumatic scenes, is to specify a visual “time-fiction” in film, to recognise a spatial form that belongs neither to the finite time of the film's narrative, or of the “eternal” time outside the film's diegesis, but participates in the order (and linking) of both. Wilfred Bion's psychoanalytic works are used to discuss the traumatic symptom of “empty time”: the inability to recollect, to make links between memory and experience, demonstrating a version of empty time that works as an external violence to spectator perception. Bion's theories offer fresh psychoanalytic perspective on trauma and its relationship to time by challenging classical ways of thinking about inner and outer perception. (shrink)

This article examines the temporal dimension of contemporary architecture, particularly in light of the climate crisis. Mikhail Bakhtin’s category of “adventure-time” is redeployed to describe the general chronotope of postmodernism, one in which contingency and spatiotemporal disjunctions are dominant. In contrast, this essay argues for a new emphasis on duration as a means of attending to temporal continuity. Potential paths for expanding architecture’s critical engagement with duration are explored.

In his temporal philosophy based on the writing of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze describes duration ( durée ) as a becoming that endures in time. Reifications of this complex philosophical concept become artistically expressed, I argue, in the form and content of South African artist William Kentridge's series of 'charcoal drawings for projection.' These exhibited art works provide intriguing and illuminating 'philosophical' examples of animated audio-visual media, which expressively plicate distinct images of movement and time. The composition of Kentridge's (...) films at once illuminate a regime of animated 'movement-images' that can trace their aetiological roots to classical forms of film and animation, whilst concurrently folding in complex philosophical expressions of time as duration which invoke the crystalline 'time-image' concepts of philosophers such as Bergson and Deleuze, as well as literary authors like Marcel Proust. Over and above these co-existent regimes of movement and time, Kentridge's artistic technique and exhibition practices further expose a multifarious 'geology' of other embedded time lines that serve to enrich/complicate these temporal expressions. I argue here that diegetic time- and movement-images ostensibly co-exist alongside different 'archaeologies' of time relevant to the context and creation of the artworks. For this reason, the animated drawings formulate intriguing artistic/philosophical expressions that muse on the nature of matter, memory, time and space. (shrink)

In his recent book The Stream of Consciousness, Dainton provides what must surely count as one of the most comprehensive discussions of time-consciousness in analytical philosophy. In the course of doing so, he also challenges Husserl's classical account in a number of ways. In the following contribution, I will compare Dainton's and Husserl's respective accounts. Such a comparison will not only make it evident why an analysis of time-consciousness is so important, but will also provide a neat opportunity to appraise (...) the contemporary relevance of Husserl's analysis. How does it measure up against one of the more recent analytical accounts? (shrink)

The literature on time perception is discussed. This is done with reference both to the ''cognitive-timer'' model for time estimation and to the subjective experience of apparent duration. Three assumptions underlying the model are scrutinized. I stress the strong interplay among attention, arousal, and time perception, which is at the base of the cognitive-timer model. It is suggested that a multiplicative function of two key components (the number of subjective time units and their size) should predict apparent duration. (...) Implications for other cognitive domains are drawn, and in particular an analogy is suggested between apparent duration and apparent movement. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the patterns of lifestyle and posed psychological stress on pregnant women. However, the association of sleep duration and screen time with anxiety among pregnant women under the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic scenario has been poorly addressed. We conducted one large-scale, multicenter cross-sectional study which recruited 1794 pregnant women across middle and west China. Self-reported demographic characteristics, lifestyle, and mental health status were collected from 6th February to 8th May 2020. We investigated the (...) association of sleep duration and screen time with the risk of anxiety by multivariable logistic regression analysis and linear regression analysis after adjusting potential confounders. The dose-response relationship of sleep duration and screen time with anxiety was visualized using a cubic spline plot. Our data revealed that almost 35% of pregnant women suffered from anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sleep duration was dose-dependently associated with a lower risk of anxiety among pregnant women, while screen time exhibited a conversed effect. Notably, sleep duration synergistically combined with screen time to diminish the risk of anxiety. Taken together, sleep duration and screen time were independently and jointly associated with anxiety. Therefore, promoting a more active lifestyle and maintaining higher sleep quality could improve the mental health of pregnant women, especially under public health emergency. (shrink)

This book studies various perspectives in the history of European philosophy on the relationship between time and movement. Ever since the pre-Socratic thinker Zeno of Elea linked time and space to understand bodily movement, his so-called paradoxes of motion have remained unsolved. One of his most important critics, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, criticized the usual connection between time and space and established a new way of understanding time as duration (durée). Whereas Zeno presented an objectivist understanding of time, (...) Bergson emphasized its subjectivist meaning. Both contradictory positions seem incompatible, referring to pure intellect (Zeno) on the one hand or pure sensation (Bergson) on the other. Looking at Hegel's Phenomenology, this book shows that the outer and inner consciousness of time became crucial to his principle of movement and change. In his view, time is an integral part of dialectical processes that are historically substantiated. Hegel sought to subordinate pure concepts and ideas so that they would become indispensable moments of the self knowing spirit. Cassirer appreciated the idealism of coming into being but rejected Hegel's concept of the absolute. Instead, he established his philosophy of symbolic forms, in which the development of different perceptions and conceptions of time - from situational affective experience to the mathematical system of relations - determines the direction of the symbolic formation process. In the end, the sensitive concept of time is replaced by the relational concept of natural numbers, in which all here-and-now experiences are embedded. Finally, Bourdieu attempts to reintegrate symbolic forms into social processes. The book reflects on the concepts mentioned here by discussing their pros and cons in order to shed more light on the relationship between time and movement in European thought. (shrink)

Since the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 in China, people have been exposed to a flood of media news related to the pandemic every day. Studies have shown that media news about public crisis events have a significant impact on individuals' depression. However, how and when the duration of attention to pandemic news predicts depression still remains an open question. This study established a moderated mediating model to investigate the relationship between the duration of attention to pandemic news (...) and depression, the mediating effect of risk perception, and the moderating effect of future time perspective on the relationship. In early February 2020, 701 individuals from 29 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities across China were asked to self-report their duration of attention to pandemic news, level of depression, risk perception, and future time perspective during the COVID-19 outbreak. Results show that there is a significant positive correlation between the duration of attention to news on COVID-19 and depression; risk perception mediates the association between the duration of attention to pandemic news and depression; and future time perspective plays a moderating role between risk perception and depression. The findings of the present study provide theoretical implications and practically throw some light on alleviating the public's depression during pandemic periods. We highlight that the individual's hope for a better future, focusing on positive news, and time perspective balance during an epidemic disease are also beneficial to promoting positive emotion and reducing depression. (shrink)

Descartes' account of the material world relies heavily on time. Most importantly, time is a component of speed, which figures in his fundamental conservation principle and laws. However, in his most systematic discussion of the concept, time is treated as some-how reducible both to thought and to motion. Such reductionistic views, while common among Descartes' late scholastic contemporaries, are very ill-suited to Cartesian physics. I show that, in spite of the apparent identifications with thought and motion, Cartesian time retains—in the (...) form of what I will call 'successive duration'—precisely the intrinsic structure necessary to serve as an independent parameter of quantitative physics. As is often the case with Descartes, he gives the impression of embracing traditional doctrines while in fact radically transforming the underlying concepts to serve his scientific agenda. His theory of time, though formulated in Aristotelian terms, anticipates Newton in important respects. (shrink)

Often illustrated with the examples of melody, Bergson’s key concept of durée is best known for its qualitative, heterogeneous, and thus immeasurable multiplicity. However, the examples he gives in Time and Free Will—such as “the regular oscillations of a pendulum” or “the successive strokes of a distant bell”—suggest rather periodic phenomena that would require another perspec­tive in terms of rhythm. When we “get into a rhythm,” we perceive a numerical quality without counting. Rhythm makes glimpse “Otherwise than Measuring”. Focusing on (...) the “rhythmic organization of the whole” within duration could reveal the secret of Bergson’s enigmatic phrase: “this heterogeneity contains number only potentially.” This paper reexamines the theoretical scope of rhyth­measure in two ways. First, it shows how this image médiatrice we forged is going to be renewed by recent studies emphasizing duration-number (Miravete) or multi-time scale theory (Hirai). Second, it explores the ethico-political impli­cations of rhythmeasure. Bergson, in his last book Two Sources of Morality and Religion, multiplies images of “a justice (…) which no longer evokes ideas ofrelativity and proportion, but, on the contrary, of the incommensurable and the absolute”. The very ambiguity of démesuré revitalizes the famous opposition of “the closed/the open”. Keywords: Duration. Rhythm. Number. Ethics. Démesure. (shrink)

Turning the attention to the temporal as well as the more familiar spatial dimensions of mobility, this volume focuses on the momentum for and temporal composition of mobility, the rate at which people enact or deploy their movements as well as the conditions under which these moves are being marshalled, represented and contested. This is an anthropological exploration of temporality as a form of action, a process of actively modulating or responding to how people are moving rather than the more (...) usual focus in mobility studies on where they are heading. (shrink)

Bergson's central contention is that time is not measurable by any objective standard; in Duration and Simultaneity, that position is tried out against the major movement in physics of the day - Relativity. Bergson argues that Relativity fails to live up to the promise of a truly relative physics, and counter to its own spirit retains some of the objectivist assumptions of previous world views. Duration and Simultaneity was conceived in the desire to make good the new paradigm (...) to which Relativity was bound to lay claim; in the desire to be more Einsteinian than Einstein. (shrink)

This study examined the effect of an interference task on the consolidation of duration in long-term memory. In a temporal generalization task, the participants performed a learning phase with a reference duration that either was, or was not, followed 30 minutes later by a 15-min interference task. They were then given a memory test, 24h later. Using different participant groups, several reference durations were examined, from several hundred milliseconds (600ms) to several seconds (2.5, 4 and 8s). The results (...) showed that the scalar timing property (i.e. precision proportional to judged duration) was preserved despite the interference task given during the memory consolidation process. However, the interference task increased the variability of time judgment and tended to produce a lengthening effect in all reference duration conditions. The modeling of individual data with parameters derived from scalar expectancy theory suggests that disrupting the memory consolidation of learned reference durations introduces noise in their representation in memory, with time being specifically distorted towards a lengthened duration. (shrink)

The article offers a speculative comparison of two approaches to modern materialist science – that of Heidegger based on the understanding of ecstatic time and that of Bergson based on the notion of vital momentum, or pure duration. Bergson’s notion of vital momentum can be derived from the Heideggerian ecstasy of the future. The notion of fundamental material elements as well as the notion of their lawful movement can be derived from the Heideggerian ecstasies of the past and the (...) present. Bergson also sees modern science as based on the concept of what is finished (past) and of what is present (given). While Bergson opposes his vital momentum to the notion of matter which underlies modern materialist science, Heidegger shows the historical origin of these notions in the Greek understanding of Presence and also the ontological origin in Presence as ecstatic time. Bergson’s pure duration is a mode of the inauthentic understanding of temporality. The analysis and comparison draw on phenomenological-hermeneutical approach, fundamental ontology as well as ‘philosophy of life’. (shrink)

In 1922, Albert Einstein rejected Bergson’s concept of time. He even declared that Bergson’s duration did not exist, something that Bergson never quite came to terms with. On the other hand, some of Bergson’s reflections indicated that in a certain respect he was close to the spirit of modern physics, especially quantum theory. The author, therefore, asks whether it is possible to equate Bergson’s duration with the quantum space-time continuum and thus rehabilitate Bergson’s concept. The first part of (...) the article, in addition to the definition of duration, focuses on the connection of the subject, time, and matter in Bergson, which represents one of the points of contact with quantum theory. The second part describes the role of the subject in quantum theory. The third part presents the definition of the mentioned space-time continuum. The final section compares the two concepts and answers the research question. (shrink)