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WRAP THESIS Dixon 1997
Time, Consciousness and Scientific Explanation
A Warwick dissertation on the disunity of time, joining phenomenology, philosophy of science, and temporal experience.
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Core idea
Dixon treats time as a fractured problem rather than a single seamless category. Philosophical, phenomenological, and scientific accounts of temporality are shown to pull apart from each other instead of settling into one theory.
The thesis juxtaposes Husserlian and phenomenological questions with disputes in natural science about irreversibility, entropy, and temporal asymmetry. That structure lets lived time and scientific time challenge each other rather than being collapsed.
Within the Warwick formation map, the dissertation matters because it shows how questions of time were already central at departmental level. It forms a useful background against which later CCRU chronopolitics looks less like an isolated eccentricity and more like an intensification.
How to read this text
Start with the summary and the first chapter's map of time theories, then jump to the phenomenology sections. The payoff comes from watching the thesis refuse easy reconciliation between scientific and experiential time.
Read for contrast rather than conclusion. The most revealing passages are the ones that show why temporal disunity keeps reappearing across very different explanatory languages.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 18
The phenomenon of temporal irreversibility was dismissed as a curiosity of human consciousness, and therefore only appropriate to a phenomenological level of description. The feeling that we have a past, present and a future is dismissed as a characteristic of the human observer, not existing in scientific reality and therefore not important in terms of scientific explanation. No serious attempt was deemed necessary to reconcile the perceived arrow of time with other levels of description.
Definition · paragraph 32
2: 4 Consciousness, Husserl presents us with a set of a priori laws which always structure our consciousness of time. (See Section 2.4 below) Immediately phenomenology is setting itself and its subject matter (essences) apart from the subject matter of the empirical sciences. And grounded in this separation are the explanations both for why phenomenology requires its own methodology and also the justification for its claim to be a foundational or first philosophy.
Definition · paragraph 32
In the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl claims for phenomenology the status of first philosophy as it makes essences manifest. These essences and the transcendental subject, who intends these essences, are arrived at by careful reflection on our conscious life. An example of this is shown in his book on time-consciousness.
Definition · paragraph 30
Firstly, that phenomenology is the only possible foundation for epistemology. It alone can reveal the eternal truths of thought, and is thus the only possible philosophy. We shall see, for example in his work on time-consciousness that Husserl eliminates all other potential candidates for a philosophy of time on methodological grounds.
History · paragraph 2
C. E. STY a\ 9921525 (LI8RA8y) 9_ .5 A5 Submitted in fuf &nent of the wquinments for tlae deg w of Doctor of Philosophy University of Warwick Department of Philosophy September 1997
Appears in sections
Warwick and Formation Primary section
How the CCRU emerged around Warwick, Sadie Plant, Nick Land, and an unstable collaborative scene.