The Experience and Perception of Time. What is ‘the perception of time’?
The very expression ‘the perception of time’ invites objection. Insofar as time is something different from events, we do not perceive time as such, but changes or events in time. But, arguably, we do not perceive events only, but also their temporal relations. So, just as it is natural to say that we perceive spatial distances and other relations between objects (I see the dragonfly as hovering above the surface of the water), it seems natural to talk of perceiving one event following another (the thunderclap as following the flash of lightning), though even here there is a difficulty.
For what we perceive, we perceive as present—as going on right now. Kinds of temporal experience There are a number of what Ernst Pöppel (1978) calls ‘elementary time experiences’, or fundamental aspects of our experience of time. Duration The inference model may be plausible enough when we are dealing with distant events, but rather less so for much more recent ones. Enlightenment Philosophers. John Locke. 1.
Historical Background and Locke's Life John Locke (1632–1704) was one of the greatest philosophers in Europe at the end of the seventeenth century. Locke grew up and lived through one of the most extraordinary centuries of English political and intellectual history. It was a century in which conflicts between Crown and Parliament and the overlapping conflicts between Protestants, Anglicans and Catholics swirled into civil war in the 1640s. With the defeat and death of Charles I, there began a great experiment in governmental institutions including the abolishment of the monarchy, the House of Lords and the Anglican church, and the establishment of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate in the 1650s.
John Rawls. 1.
Life and Work Rawls was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. His father was a prominent lawyer, his mother a chapter president of the League of Women Voters. Rawls studied at Princeton, where he was influenced by Wittgenstein's student Norman Malcolm; and at Oxford, where he worked with H. L. Rawls's adult life was a scholarly one: its major events occurred within his writings. Rawls's most discussed work is his theory of a just liberal society, called justice as fairness. 2. 2.1 Four Roles of Political Philosophy Rawls sees political philosophy as fulfilling at least four roles in a society's public life. A second role of political philosophy is to help citizens to orient themselves within their own social world. A third role is to probe the limits of practicable political possibility. 2.2 The Sequence of Theories In contrast to the utilitarian, for Rawls political philosophy is not simply applied moral philosophy. 2.3 Ideal and Non-Ideal Theory 2.4 Reflective Equilibrium.