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Locke and the Specious Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Douglas Odegard
Douglas Odegard*
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
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Extract

I intend to defend three claims in this paper: (1) Locke's position does imply a specious present theory, one which importantly resembles a version adopted by C. D. Broad. (2) Contrary to what some commentators think or imply, Locke does not make the ideas which occupy the specious present durationless and he does not confine the specious present to the duration of what we experience in reflection. (3) The theory he implies does create a serious problem for him, however, and in order to avoid the problem he must drop the reflective specious present.

The specious present theory in general holds that what we experience as a whole is never instantaneous and that at least part of the duration of what we experience as a whole at a given time is earlier than that time. The experienced present is always at least in part a bit of the past. For example, if at t I hear a sequence of sounds, then at least the first sound in the sequence is earlier than t, since I first heard it before t.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 4: New Essays on Rationalism and Empiricism , 1978 , pp. 141 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1978

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References

1 References to the Essay are to John Yolton's 2-volume Everyman's edition.

2 See Broad's Scientific Thought (London, 1923), Ch. 10.

3 Principles of Psychology (New York, 1890), Vol. 1, Ch. 16, p. 609.

4 See Principles, Vol. 1, Ch. 16, p. 609n.

5 See Woozley's “Introduction” to his Fontana abridgment of the Essay and Yolton's Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding (CUP, 1970), Ch. 5.

6 Locke and the Compass p. 134.

7 “Psychology”, Encyclopaedia Britannica 9/e; quoted approvingly by James op. cit., pp. 629-30.

8 See Broad's, Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy (Cambridge, 1938), Vol. 2, p. 282.Google Scholar H.J. Paton insists that the contradiction is genuine in “Self-Identity”, Mind 38 (1929) and J. C. Mabbott raises a similar objection in “Our Direct Experience of Time”, Mind 60 (1951).