Now-thoughts

‘Now’-thoughts are often categorised alongside ‘I’-thoughts. The word ‘I’- (including its counterparts in other languages) and the thoughts typically expressed with it have long been a source of fascination for philosophers. ‘I’- seemingly behaves in peculiar ways, which many writers take to reflect some interesting features of the thoughts it typically expresses. Whilst the similarities between the behaviour of ‘I’- and ‘now’- have often been noted, the latter has received much less attention in the literature. In this paper, I will take some of the most influential ideas and frameworks that have been used to analyse ‘I’-thought and draw on phenomenological descriptions of temporal experience to provide an account of ‘now’- thought. I will argue that a certain important class of ‘now’-thoughts do not involve thinking about a particular time and predicating something of it, but instead merely involve registering the presence of events. I will end by sketching an account of how these claims might sit with a theory of the word ‘now’.