Common threads · 6 books
Start with time as lived experience, then test philosophical accounts of persistence, temporal order, and what it means to exist over time.
Books, curator notes, and what to read next.
Henri Bergson
Bergson distinguishes lived duration from measured time. Ask whether treating experience as a series of units changes its character.
Next: Phenomenology of Perception
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Work through the preface and chapters on the body. Notice how perception depends on being situated in a world.
Next: Being and Time
Martin Heidegger
Begin with everyday being-in-the-world before the chapters on death and temporality. Keep a glossary as the vocabulary develops.
Next: Reasons and Persons
Derek Parfit
Read the sections on identity and future people as connected questions about whose interests matter over time.
Next: Real Time II
D. H. Mellor
Mellor develops a tenseless account of time. Compare claims about temporal order with claims about a moving present.
Next: Four-Dimensionalism
Theodore Sider
Sider treats persistence through time using temporal parts. Test how that proposal handles ordinary objects and change.
Also includes Being and Time
Study the fear of death, the value of a finite life, and our dependence on a future we will never personally see.
Also includes Phenomenology of Perception
Study intentionality, bodies, other people, and selfhood. Move between foundational texts and later work connecting lived experience with philosophy of mind.
Also includes Being and Time
Faith, temporality, consciousness, absurdity, and situated freedom. Follow a set of influential encounters without flattening their authors into one school.
