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Articles

The Phenomenology of Time in Memento

Becca Turcotte looks at some aspects of our experience of time, as revealed by a temporally-challenging movie.

We all want to understand the nature of the world in which we live, but philosophers have pointed out that there are some big obstacles to doing so. What we see, hear and touch depends not only on the external world but also on the nature of our sense organs. Frustratingly our experience of perception is also shaped by the structure of our minds – by our categories of understanding, as Kant put it – and by our cultural expectations. So how can we obtain truly independent information about the external world to understand it better? The 20th century philosophical movement known as phenomenology said that we should try to focus on the immediate data of perception, to notice how things look before we culturally interpret them. Philosophers such as Husserl and Heidegger, and a little later Sartre, tried to develop techniques to make it easier to do this.

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