Dr Julian Bacharach | Trinity College Dublin
Julian Bacharach is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. Before that, he held postdoctoral research positions at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology in Antwerp; and at the Humboldt University in Berlin, at the Lehrstuhl of Professor Tobias Rosefeldt on a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
He did his PhD in Philosophy at University College London (UCL), supervised by Rory Madden and M. G. F. Martin. HIs research lies at the intersection the philosophy of mind and metaphysics.
Title | 'On the Very Idea of a Temporal Perspective'
Abstract:
We live in time. It is not just that all our thoughts, actions and experiences happen at some particular point in time. Rather, our perspective on the world is always from some particular temporal point of view. But how exactly should we understand the notion of a temporal perspective? How, if at all, does the perspectival character of our experience of time manifest itself?
In this paper I argue, first, for a negative phenomenological claim: our perceptual experience of time is not manifestly temporally perspectival—does not normally seem to the experiencing subject to be had from a particular temporal perspective—in the way that the experience of space (at least, paradigmatically, visual experience) is manifestly spatially perspectival.
There is, however, a kind of manifest temporal perspectivity inherent in the experience of acting, in the different ways in which the immediate past and future bear on an agent's present activity. But, unlike the spatial case, this element of perspectivity seems somehow ineradicable from our understanding of time itself. I end by relating this to the concern, exemplified by McTaggart's infamous argument, that we cannot describe the passage of time without inconsistency.