The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation - Tapa dura

an unusual and refreshing addition to the literature. He is to be applauded for demonstrating that the issues temporal metaphysicians engage with have relevance beyond the confines of temporal metaphysics itself. (Barry Dainton, Times Literary Supplement)

highly original and distinctive... reflection on the large and varied range of the mind's engagements with time can provide a very rich, and as yet rather underexplored, source of insights into the very nature of time. (Christoph Hoerl , Mind)

Le Poidevin's Images is a rewarding and imaginative treatment of the nature of temporal representation, nourished with a broad range of examples: perception, memory, pictorial art, and narrative fiction. (Ian B. Phillips, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science)

Le Poidevin should be praised for crafting his own research projects and shining a light on temporal representation from such a wide variety of topics. Not many books address topics in philosophy of mind, psychology, cognitive science, epistemology, metaphysics of time, philosophy of art, and literary criticism! Readers looking for a book with fresh material and challenging arguments to think about will find one here. (Craig Callender, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)

The Images of Time presents a philosophical investigation of the nature of time and the mind's ways of representing it. Robin Le Poidevin examines how we perceive time and change, the means by which memory links us with the past, the attempt to represent change and movement in art, and the nature of 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.

Le Poidevin 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 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? Le Poidevin argues 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.