CFP: Perceiving Time: New Perspectives on Temporal Experience

In philosophy, problems of temporal perception cut across many different issues. Consider listening to a piano concerto: as you hear a C major scale, you begin to anticipate the coming note. The pianist defies your expectation, resting for a surprising amount of time. The pause seems to last forever. Finally, you are relieved to hear his scale completed.

This raises the issue of how expectation, memory, and knowledge figure in the perception of events as they unfold over time. Such issues are puzzling when we consider that our perception is closely tied to what occurs at the present moment – after all, we only perceive what currently impinges on our senses. On the other hand, it is evident that the pianist’s pause has a certain temporal extension, stretching beyond the present moment. In this way, your perception seems to transcend the present, allowing you to experience a temporally extended phenomenon – and perhaps even anticipate what comes next.

Philosophical puzzles like this one are at the heart of our workshop (May 27–28 2025; Turin, Italy). We aim to explore new developments in the philosophy of temporal perception, with a particular focus on the most up-to-date issues in the field, broadly construed. We welcome contributions from all approaches empirically informed, historical or purely philosophical.

A non-exhaustive list of possible topics includes:

• The perception of change and motion
• The concept of the specious present
• Temporal experience and sense modalities
• Presentness and tensed perception
• Perception of temporally extended events
• The different roles and structures of perception, memory, and anticipation
• Time in mental imagery, dreams, illusions, hallucinations, and other mentals states, compared to perception
• Perceiving durations at short and long timescales
• Judgments about time based on perception
• Multimodal and crossmodal temporal perception
• Empirically informed perspectives on temporal perception

Presentations should be suitable for a 30 minutes talk and about 20 minutes Q&A. Abstracts (500 words) and a one-page short cv should be sent to [email protected] and [email protected] by Friday, March 21, 2025.  

When: May 27–28, 2025

Where: Department of Philosophy and Human Sciences, University of Turin, Via Sant’Ottavio 20, 10124, Turin, Italy

Further information: We have some budget for travel expenses and meals

Submission deadline: Friday, March 21, 2025

Women and underrepresented minorities are encouraged to apply.

This workshop is part of the activities of the FIS project HeaR “Hearing and Remembering” (FIS_00000243), led by prof. Elvira Di Bona (University of Turin).