ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how we might have time or some temporal property or relation be a constituent of the experience. To do this, we must consider erroneous temporal experiences. There is a phenomenological reason to resist identifying the perceptual experience of time with other kinds of temporal experience. This difference is not just a matter of the quantity of duration. Such external things are at a different time to their related subjective activity in us. However, if they are perceptually experienced together, they appear to be at the same time as the subjective activity. Retention theory has its roots in Husserl's work on the phenomenology of time. It is allegedly an account of the phenomenology or appearance of time. So conceived, retention theory seems to be an account of temporal experience in terms of its content. There have been doubts that these elements correspond to the apparent features of temporal experience.
