Abstract Do we ‘perceive’ time? In what sense does memory give us access to the past? Can photographs and paintings capture more than a single moment? What is ‘fictional time’? These apparently disparate questions all concern the ways in which we represent aspects of time, in thought, experience, art, and fiction. They also raise fundamental problems for our philosophical understanding, both of mental representation, and of the nature of time itself. This book brings together issues in philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, and literary theory in examining the mechanisms underlying our representation of time in various media, and brings these to bear on metaphysical debates over the real nature of time. These debates concern questions over which aspects of time are genuinely part of time's intrinsic nature, and which, in some sense, are mind-dependent. Arguably, the most important debate concerns time's passage: does time pass in reality, or is the division of events into past, present and future simply a reflection of our temporal perspective — a result of the interaction between a ‘static’ world and minds capable of representing it? It is argued that contrary to what perception and memory lead us to suppose, time does not really pass, and this surprising conclusion can be reconciled with the characteristic features of temporal experience. The book goes on to consider the representation of time in art and fiction, and draws on the metaphysical and psychological themes previously discussed to cast light on the nature of depiction and fictional narrative.
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