The Obsession with Time in 1880s-1930s American-British Philosophy

Thomas, Emily

doi:10.1080/09608788.2022.2093157

The Obsession with Time in 1880s-1930s American-British Philosophy

Thomas, Emily

Authors

Professor Emily Thomas emily.e.thomas@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

In American-British philosophy around the turn of the twentieth century, every philosopher and their dog had something to say on time. Thinkers worried about our experience of time: Do we actually experience time? How do we experience the present? Is temporal experience continuous? They also worried about the metaphysics of time: Is time real? What is its nature? How does time relate to space? Excepting the leviathan literature on J. M. E. McTaggart, time during this period is under-studied . Further, the existing scholarship tends 1 to be piecemeal, focusing on time in individual philosophers and only occasionally considering the philosophical scene more broadly2. This collection offers the first sustained study of 1880s-1930s American-British philosophy of time, exploring the work of Shadworth Hodgson, William James, Mary Calkins, Victoria Welby, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, A. A. Robb, Alfred North Whitehead, Norman Kemp Smith, McTaggart, Karin Costelloe-Stephen, Hilda Oakeley, May Sinclair, and George P. Adams. The following pages showcase the richness and fecundity of temporal thought during this period.

Citation

Thomas, E. (2023). The Obsession with Time in 1880s-1930s American-British Philosophy. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 31(2), 149-160. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2093157

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jun 20, 2022
Online Publication Date	Feb 6, 2023
Publication Date	2023
Deposit Date	Jul 1, 2022
Publicly Available Date	Feb 8, 2023
Journal	British Journal for the History of Philosophy
Print ISSN	0960-8788
Electronic ISSN	1469-3526
Publisher	Routledge
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	31
Issue	2
Pages	149-160
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2093157

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© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.