Journal of Consciousness Studies 17:1-2 (February 2010) pp.119-143
Galen Strawson has articulated a spectrum of “temporal temperaments,” populated at one end by “Diachronics”, who experience their selves (understood as a “present mental entity”) as persisting across time, and at the other end by “Episodics”, who lack any such sense of temporal extension. He argues that nothing normatively significant depends upon diachronicity, so Episodics can live fully moral (and fully satisfying) lives. As an Episodic, Strawson provides lucid descriptions of the episodic self-experience he seeks to defend, but does not furnish the non-reductive phenomenology of diachronicity his account requires if it is to maintain that neither temperament is inherently preferable. I attempt to supply this missing phenomenology of diachronic self-experience using Kierkegaard’s account of “contemporaneity.” Kierkegaard offers a compelling description of diachronic self-experience that is fully normative in character, one that also offers more parsimonious explanations for certain puzzling features of Episodicity than Strawson’s account does.