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(1963) Studies in recent philosophy, Dordrecht, Springer.
In the first chapter of The Philosophy of the Present, Mead insists that reality lies in the present and that there is no actuality in the past or in the future except as it is a reference of the present. This insistence is so strong that upon a first reading it is apt to seem paradoxical. It is as if Mead were saying that there is no past except as a construction within the present. A hasty reader might suppose that Mead disregards the reality of time and holds that the historian's account of the course of past events is only an invention. Mead, however, does not hold this. What he says is to the contrary: that in the field of memory and history "there is uncertainty as to what has happened, but something has happened." 1 He takes time seriously, and although his philosophy is a philosophy of the present, it is a philosophy of temporal process.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-3618-4_2
Full citation:
Lee, H. N. (1963). Mead's doctrine of the past, in Studies in recent philosophy, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 52-75.
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