Daniele Cassaghi

Retentionalism and extensionalism are theories of temporal consciousness. As such, they aim to explain how subjects are aware of temporally extended phenomena as succession. Direct realism and representationalism are theories of general perception: they aim to explain what our perceptual experience consists of and what kinds of objects we perceive. The received view marries retentionalism with representationalism and extensionalism with direct realism. Although some forms of extensionalism departing from direct realism have been advanced, nobody has proposed the fourth combination: retentional direct realism. This paper aims to fill the gap and provide a way to understand how retentionalism and direct realism can be coherently combined. This new theory takes the best of the two worlds, putting together the, arguably, best theory of temporal consciousness with the, arguably, best theory of general perception. And it has an additional advantage: it easily solves one of the main problems for retentionalism in the literature: the problem of repeated contents.

The time-lag argument is one of the classic objections to naive realism. Recently, some philosophers have attempted to address this objection by combining naive realism with a specific metaphysical theory of time: eternalism. Indeed, there is a current consensus that presentism—the rival theory to eternalism—makes it impossible for naive realism to respond to the time-lag argument. In this paper, I will show that this received view is mistaken. In particular, I will demonstrate that there are no inconsistencies in combining naive realism with presentism, and that the way in which presentist naive realism responds to the time-lag argument is very similar to the eternalist approach. As such, it shares the same critical issues. Finally, I will show how the "costs" of presentist naive realism can be reduced either to the general costs of presentism relative to eternalism or, more specifically, to the costs that naive realism must pay to address the time-lag objection regardless of whether it is combined with presentism or eternalism. Thus, the resulting view has no further costs than the costs of the views taken in isolation.