RETAINING RETENTIONALISM. A DEFENCE OF A TENSELESS ACCOUNT OF PERCEPTUAL EXPERIENCE

We are able to perceive temporally structured events, like change, motion and persistence. These events do have temporal properties like duration, temporal order and simultaneity. In addition, many philosophers hold that, contrary to space, these temporal properties do not exhaust our temporal experience. Time itself, they hold, is felt as enjoying a transient character over and above these relations. Our awareness of temporal properties and the alleged flowing character of time are the object of analysis of this dissertation. Many philosophical problems and issues arise in this respect, among which the Paradox of Temporal Experience, the requirement of accommodating temporal transparency and the troubles for the B-Theory because of the so-called "Argument from Phenomenology". In addressing all of them, I will propose a full-blown tenseless account of temporal perception, implemented via retentionalism. It is a completely new proposal, since the received view runs against this very hypothesis, especially if the latter is accompanied by a naive realist conception of experience. In other words, I will show that no reference to any temporal location is within our perceptual contents. Moreover, In respect of the idea of a perceived flow, I will propose that this relies on a mistake. There is nothing like the perception of time passage. Finally, It is worth to point out that, within the overall field of philosophy of perception, our ability to perceive time is an unicum. While it is often said that our acts of perception do not share the properties of the perceived objects, it is still the case that temporal perception occurs in time. This is very interesting because temporal properties of perception come to have a role at explaining our ability to be acquainted with temporal properties in the environment. Finally, temporal perception has a lot of connections with other inquiries such metaphysics and cognitive science which will be explored in various extent.