Time Consciousness

The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness is a translation of Edmund Husserl’s Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins. The first part of the book was originally presented as a lecture course at the University of Göttingen in the winter semester of 1904–1905, while the second part is based on additional supplementary lectures that he gave between 1905 and 1910. In these essays and lectures, Husserl explores the terrain of consciousness in light of its temporality. He identifies two categories of temporality—retention and protention—and outlines how temporality provides the form for perception, phantasy, imagination, memory, and recollection. He demonstrates a distinction between cosmic and phenomenological time and explores the relevance of phenomenological time for the constitution of temporal objects. The ideas Husserl developed here are explored further in his Ideas and were pursued until the end of his philosophical career.

Edmund Husserl occupied himself with the analysis of time-consciousness throughout his life. In this book, the three stages that may be distinguished in Husserl's occupation with this theme are discussed in their interrelationship. The first stage consists of a lecture manuscript from 1905; the second stage consists of the so-called Bernau manuscripts, research manuscripts that were written in 1917 and 1918; and the final stage consists of the so-called C-manuscripts, research manuscripts that were written in the late 1920s and the early 1930s. Central themes in the discussion of Husserl's phenomenology of time in this book are: the connection between the analysis of time-consciousness and the analysis of phantasy-consciousness and image-consciousness; Husserl's position in the debate between A. Meinong and W. Stern concerning the possibility of the perception of time; the self-constitution of absolute time-consciousness; the influence of Husserl's development of genetic phenomenology on his analysis of time-consciousness; and the question of the intentional character of time-consciousness.

Our subjective inner life is what really matters to us as human beings--and yet we know relatively little about how it arises. Over a long and distinguished career Benjamin Libet has conducted experiments that have helped us see, in clear and concrete ways, how the brain produces conscious awareness. For the first time, Libet gives his own account of these experiments and their importance for our understanding of consciousness. Most notably, Libet's experiments reveal a substantial delay--the mind time of the title--before any awareness affects how we view our mental activities. If all conscious awarenesses are preceded by unconscious processes, as Libet observes, we are forced to conclude that unconscious processes initiate our conscious experiences. Freely voluntary acts are found to be initiated unconsciously before an awareness of wanting to act--a discovery with profound ramifications for our understanding of free will. How do the physical activities of billions of cerebral nerve cells give rise to an integrated conscious subjective awareness? How can the subjective mind affect or control voluntary actions? Libet considers these questions, as well as the implications of his discoveries for the nature of the soul, the identity of the person, and the relation of the non-physical subjective mind to the physical brain that produces it. Rendered in clear, accessible language, Libet's experiments and theories will allow interested amateurs and experts alike to share the experience of the extraordinary discoveries made in the practical study of consciousness.

Wallace Chafe demonstrates how the study of language and consciousness together can provide an unexpectedly broad understanding of the way the mind works. Relying on analyses of conversational speech, written fiction and nonfiction, the North American Indian language Seneca, and the music of Mozart and of the Seneca people, he investigates both the flow of ideas through consciousness and the displacement of consciousness by way of memory and imagination. Chafe draws on several decades of research to demonstrate that understanding the nature of consciousness is essential to understanding many topics of linguistic importance, such as anaphora, tense, clause structure, and intonation, as well as stylistic usages such as the historical present and free indirect style. This book offers a comprehensive picture of the dynamic natures of language and consciousness for linguists, psychologists, literary scholars, computer scientists, anthropologists, and philosophers.

Traditional metaphysics is hostile to the world of the senses. From Plato to Kant, philosophers have demanded that the sensuous and corporeal aspects of existence be circumscribed by rational conditions and properties. Without these, the sensuous is unintelligible. This elevation of the ability to reason as quintessentially human has obscured efforts to acknowledge the pivotal role the historical imagination has in grounding experience. In The Philosophical Uses of History, Gabriel Ricci explores the opposite tendency, from Vico to Heidegger, to emphasize temporal and historical foundations of human consciousness. Ricci's goal is to demonstrate the reciprocity of history and philosophy. He challenges the epistemological construction of the subject-object relationship and the facile dualism originating from Descartes. Arguing that consciousness must be defined in time and space, he shows how Vico's philosophy of humanity, with its historical epistemology, resurrects the practical implications of ancient philosophy's demand that knowledge and truth derive from a productive process. Ricci analyzes Heidegger's philosophy as the modern embodiment of the temporality of consciousness, and he demonstrates the origins of his particular interpretation of human existence in Rickert's and Windelband's delineation of the historical and natural sciences. Ricci links their influence to Heidegger's dissent over Ranke's objectivist methodology, which ended with Heiddegger's emphasis of the historical character of human existence. Finally, the author argues for the compatibility of Heidegger's early existential analytic and his later investigation of poetry and his critique of the technological idiom which had colonized philosophy. In doing so, Ricci highlights the metaphoric and figurative predisposition of mind as synthetic functions of historical consciousness. In offering a thoroughly temporal interpretation of mind, Ricci illuminates the relationship between philosophy and history, poetry, the cognitive sciences, and the natural sciences. This work will be of interest to philosophers, literary scholars, and cultural historians. Gabriel Ricci is associate professor of philosophy at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, and editor (with Paul Gottfried) of the annual serial publication Religion and Public Life.

This book examines Husserl's treatment of time-consciousness and its significance for his conception of subjectivity.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

What altered states of consciousness—the dissolution of feelings of time and self—can tell us about the mystery of consciousness. During extraordinary moments of consciousness—shock, meditative states and sudden mystical revelations, out-of-body experiences, or drug intoxication—our senses of time and self are altered; we may even feel time and self dissolving. These experiences have long been ignored by mainstream science, or considered crazy fantasies. Recent research, however, has located the neural underpinnings of these altered states of mind. In this book, neuropsychologist Marc Wittmann shows how experiences that disturb or widen our everyday understanding of the self can help solve the mystery of consciousness. Wittmann explains that the relationship between consciousness of time and consciousness of self is close; in extreme circumstances, the experiences of space and self intensify and weaken together. He considers the emergence of the self in waking life and dreams; how our sense of time is distorted by extreme situations ranging from terror to mystical enlightenment; the experience of the moment; and the loss of time and self in such disorders as depression, schizophrenia, and epilepsy. Dostoyevsky reported godly bliss during epileptic seizures; neurologists are now investigating the phenomenon of the epileptic aura. Wittmann describes new studies of psychedelics that show how the brain builds consciousness of self and time, and discusses pilot programs that use hallucinogens to treat severe depression, anxiety, and addiction. If we want to understand our consciousness, our subjectivity, Wittmann argues, we must not be afraid to break new ground. Studying altered states of consciousness leads us directly to the heart of the matter: time and self, the foundations of consciousness.