| _version_ | 1866901992469692416 |
|---|---|
| author | Sulin, Zhang Wutong, Tang |
| author_facet | Sulin, Zhang Wutong, Tang |
| contents | <p>This paper advances a systematic thesis I call post-evental epistemology: the epistemic objects of consciousness — the very things to which we direct belief, judgement, and philosophical discourse — are, by virtue of how consciousness constitutes them, always already past. Consciousness, whether perceptual, memorial, or linguistic, requires a minimal temporal interval (a latency, an integration window, a reconstruction) for an experiential datum to become an object of knowledge. From this simple temporal constraint follows a cluster of conceptual consequences: discussions that purport to directly apprehend the ontological status of the present or to know the future in anything but probabilistic terms rest on fundamentally retrospective grounds; truth-claims about “now” are indexed to a slightly prior instant; and methods of justification must be reframed so that evidence is understood as temporally located and reconstructive.</p> <p> </p> <p>I defend the thesis by (1) clarifying the central concepts (“now”, “object of consciousness”, “retrospectivity”); (2) situating the claim within a historical conversation (Kant, Husserl, Bergson, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), showing where these traditions gesture toward but ultimately under-specify the epistemic pastness of objects; and (3) bringing philosophical phenomenology into dialogue with interdisciplinary empirical indicators (temporal integration in perception, neural processing delays, the temporal structure of language production) and a set of thought experiments that expose the conceptual stakes. The paper argues that admitting the epistemic primacy of the already-ended neither collapses agency nor dissolves truth, but requires new methodological practices for philosophy and the sciences alike.</p> |
| format | Recurso digital |
| id | zenodo_https___doi_org_10_5281_zenodo_17365397 |
| institution | Zenodo |
| language | |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| publisher | Zenodo |
| record_format | zenodo |
| spellingShingle | Post-Evental Epistemology: Consciousness, Temporality, and the Ontology of the Already-Ended Sulin, Zhang Wutong, Tang <p>This paper advances a systematic thesis I call post-evental epistemology: the epistemic objects of consciousness — the very things to which we direct belief, judgement, and philosophical discourse — are, by virtue of how consciousness constitutes them, always already past. Consciousness, whether perceptual, memorial, or linguistic, requires a minimal temporal interval (a latency, an integration window, a reconstruction) for an experiential datum to become an object of knowledge. From this simple temporal constraint follows a cluster of conceptual consequences: discussions that purport to directly apprehend the ontological status of the present or to know the future in anything but probabilistic terms rest on fundamentally retrospective grounds; truth-claims about “now” are indexed to a slightly prior instant; and methods of justification must be reframed so that evidence is understood as temporally located and reconstructive.</p> <p> </p> <p>I defend the thesis by (1) clarifying the central concepts (“now”, “object of consciousness”, “retrospectivity”); (2) situating the claim within a historical conversation (Kant, Husserl, Bergson, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), showing where these traditions gesture toward but ultimately under-specify the epistemic pastness of objects; and (3) bringing philosophical phenomenology into dialogue with interdisciplinary empirical indicators (temporal integration in perception, neural processing delays, the temporal structure of language production) and a set of thought experiments that expose the conceptual stakes. The paper argues that admitting the epistemic primacy of the already-ended neither collapses agency nor dissolves truth, but requires new methodological practices for philosophy and the sciences alike.</p> |
| title | Post-Evental Epistemology: Consciousness, Temporality, and the Ontology of the Already-Ended |
| url | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17365397 |