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C  1 Simultaneity and Delay: Lampert’s Already and Not Yet of Now Jason Robinson The nature of time has been an irresistible mystery for philosophers for thousands of years. The same is no less true today, although questions of time have changed dramatically under the influence of physicists such as Newton and Einstein, and the hegemony of the natural sciences. For instance, most no longer think of time in terms of the Ancient Greeks’ cyclical time, modelled on the periodical rhythms of nature, or Christian eschatological time (rectilinear historical time), with its actual though postponed Kingdom in the present age (both fulfilled and fulfilling). While elements of both persist—such as the association of time with motion, change, and the telos of direction, purpose, and delay—the mythological, allegorical, and religious have been eclipsed by a modern style of interrogation. Is time absolute or relative? How can time be warped or stretched? Is time continuous, or are there “time atoms”? Is time linear or branching? Is the direction of time an increase in entropy, or the expansion of the universe? Still, as interesting as these questions are, there is something crucial to our understanding of time that continues to be ignored by most of the dominant modes of scientific and philosophical investigation , namely, our participation in time. Time is something we experience very clearly, even self-evidently. Indeed, it is so much a part of our lives that most of us rarely give pause to consider it. When we do try to reflect upon it, especially in abstraction from what is in it, time becomes profoundly challenging and elusive. (When considering whether there is time in abstracto from things in the world, I am thinking of something unlike Kant’s time (and space) as an a priori form of pure intuition, that is, the Kantian transcendental in which time itself does not appear but is the basis of appearing—time apprehended on the basis of the relation between objects. I ultimately reject the idea that we experience time in abstraction from the apprehension of objects.)1 Across disciplines, cultures, and historical eras there has been a striking homogeneity in which examinations have been preoccupied by the same basic riddle: What is time? It is all the more surprising, then, that despite the enormous interest time has generated, it still seems just as enigmatic as it always has been. To date, virtually all that may be said with confidence is that time is analogous to a fourth dimension, similar to but distinct from the three dimensions of space.2 This paper presents one way of overcoming the current impasse in contemporary thought through a counterintuitive description of what is generally believed to be our experience of successive/sequential time (moments occurring regularly and predictably at discrete points along a symmetrical timeline). The paper has two 2 P    A main parts. First, while it would be a mistake to oversimplify issues by reducing all that might be said to mystery or even illusion, the stepping-off point for a new discussion must be the mystery generated by the question: What is time? This is a difficult question that begins and ends without clearly admi ing its own guiding presumption—that there is time. Thus we shall begin by asking ourselves how helpful this question might be, and in what sense it might limit possible answers about how we know and experience time. Second, aer we have identified some of the common-sense assumptions that get in the way of discovering a more primordial and authentic temporality, we shall consider Jay Lampert’s description of temporal experience. Through Lampert’s description we may begin to make be er sense of time as something in which there are natural structures of delay and uneven intensities in our awareness. If Lampert is correct, then telling time by the clock alone is a misleading and shallow description of a much richer and more intense experience of unfolding temporal participation. Instead of purely objective, physical, and formulaic accounts of time, a more organic and relative account is needed. To tell time, that is, to accurately describe time, we must make reference to the concrete reality of our own lives. Time: A Measure of the Mind One of the basic difficulties in questioning the nature of time is the enticing assumption that there is a Now, and that that Now is most real as an isolated and separate...

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