Abstract

To do full justice to our conscious perceptual experience, mention must be made of our ­awareness of succession, duration and change. Even the banal experience as I look out of my office window includes leaves and branches nodding in the wind, cars moving down the road, their lights blinking successively on-and-off as they turn, and now a bus pausing for a moment at its stop before moving on. ¹ Many theorists have suggested that our capacity to see such happenings, and more generally to perceive temporal aspects of reality, depends essentially on memory. Here I explore (and ultimately defend) this putative connection.