Carlos Montemayor, “Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time” (Brill, 2012)
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What is the central question of Carlos Montemayor’s book on the psychology of time?
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel in the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdoor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt. In our bimonthly podcasts, we interview philosophers about their new books across a wide variety of philosophical topics and areas. Today's interview is with Carlos Montemayor, assistant professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University, about his new book, Minding Time A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time from Brill. The philosophy of time has a variety of subtopics that are of great general as well as philosophical interest, such as the nature of time, the possibility of time travel,
And the nature of tensed language. Montemayor focuses on the question, how do we represent time? That is, how is temporal information represented in biological creatures such as ourselves? He argues that traditional discussions of the species present in fact confuse two sorts of representations of the present. Instead, empirical evidence points to a two-phase model, the sensorial present and the phenomenal present. The first is a non-conscious, multimodal, integrated simultaneity window that is closely tied to our biological clocks and which informs our sensory motor systems. The second is the rich conscious experience of succession or passage of time that does not obey the same metric constraints.
In this richly detailed study, Montemayor blends empirical research on biological time keeping mechanisms and psychological measures of simultaneity judgments with philosophical accounts of mental representation and consciousness. Let's turn to the interview. Uh hello, Carlos.
Oh hi Kerry.
Hi. Glad to have you on New Books in Philosophy.
It's great to to uh be here and uh thank you so much for the invitation. I'm very happy.
Well it's it's a very interesting book. Um I've been actually doing a number of books on various aspects of time, you know, temporal uh you know temporal propositions and uh this particular book in the psychology of time, the representation of time. Um and I'd like to do others. Um so it's it's a very interesting the whole area, philosophical area talking about time uh is very interesting and and your book focuses on a particularly, you know, interesting question of of how do we represent time. Um So let me before we get into the actual, you know, body of the book, um, maybe you could give us a little bit of introductory information about uh yourself, how you how you came to philosophy and how you came to this particular topic.
Uh sure, definitely.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the central question of Carlos Montemayor’s book on the psychology of time?
0:00–18:59
2
How does Montemayor define and differentiate the “sensorial present” and the “phenomenal present”?
18:59–28:25
3
What empirical evidence supports the two‑phase model of temporal representation?
28:25–40:22
4
How are biological clocks (circadian and interval clocks) described and why are they important?
40:22–53:26
5
What are simultaneity windows and how do they vary across sensory modalities?
53:26–1:03:59
6
How does the cross‑modal “sensory present” integrate different simultaneity judgments?
1:03:59–1:08:14
7
What is the “phenomenal present” and how does it relate to our experience of the passage of time?
1:08:14–1:09:37
Speakers
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