The Alternative Father of the Specious Present: The Experience of Time from E. Robert Kelly’s The Alternative: A Study in Psychology

Abstract

The now common, if not uncontroversial, terminology of ‘the specious present’ was coined in Kelly’s The Alternative (Clay 1882). Through returning to Kelly’s work, I have three aims. First, to make the case for there being two distinct motivations behind an appeal to a temporally extended experience as of the present: a phenomenological sense in which an interval of time invariably seems temporally present; and a need to account for the experience of succession. Second, to bring into focus—explaining and dissolving—a puzzle of temporal experience encapsulated in Kelly’s appeal to ‘paradoxic’ and ‘anti-paradoxic’ experience. The third and subsidiary aim is to provide the first substantial outline of Kelly’s account of temporal experience. Despite the common usage of Kelly’s terminology in contemporary discussions of the experience of time, there is no dedicated discussion of Kelly, and of his view of our experience of time, in the literature. This is, no doubt, in large part due to the identity of Kelly being shrouded in mystery until very recently; it is also, plausibly, because of Kelly’s standing as an amateur philosopher. Nevertheless, the minor aim of the present paper is to remedy this neglect