AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

I begin by asking what naturalising the philosophy of time should look like. I develop an account of it, drawing on work by Steven French and Alvin Goldman, whereby the philosophy of time needs to be continuous with scientific findings about the nature of time and about the human cognitive apparatus. I develop an argument against relying on intuitions in the philosophy of time, as these can be better explained by appealing to psychology and cognitive science than by taking them to be veridical. Finally, I introduce the predictive processing framework, according to which the content of our perceptual experiences is a function of both how the world is independently of us, and of a contribution made by the perceiver herself. I use this framework to argue that temporal intuitions about passage and presentness are better explained as the result of features of our internal model of the world, generated by the predictive processing framework, rather than features of the world itself.