About the future

what phenomenology can reveal

Peter McInerney

pp. 113-126

in: John Brough, Lester Embree (eds), The many faces of time, Berlin, Springer, 2000

Abstract

Most contemporary American philosophers would deny that phenomenology can reveal anything about time, and an increasing number would deny that phenomenology can reveal anything about the temporal features of human psychology. The claim that phenomenology can not reveal anything about time might be supported by the evidence for the reality of time.¹ Rejecting the Kantian tradition of temporal idealism, most contemporary American philosophers consider time to exist independently of any structures of the human mind or of human societies. If phenomenology tells us anything, the argument might continue, it tells us about how people represent time, but there are good scientific reasons for thinking that real time differs in important ways from people's everyday representations of it. If we want to find out about real time, it would be misguided to engage in phenomenology.