The possible present

Written from a loosely reinterpreted hermeneutic standpoint, this book offers an original theory of time. Its main conversation partners are Husserl and Heidegger, and it also draws on theological thinkers, namely Barth and Bonhoeffer. The author's central claim is that time resists being seized, and that the difficulty lies in the present rather than in the past, which is beyond recall, or the future, which remains unknown. The present slips away continuously, yet it is also the threshold where what has been and what is to come converge, opening a horizon in which meaning can take root. Against the view that time is merely a row of separate moments, the book treats the present as something that can be stretched and given a real opportunity to exist.

On this account, the work of philosophy is to give time room to be, and to lend it form, place and extent. The author argues that philosophy has never fully left behind a narrative way of thinking, and he calls on it to make time its primary subject, much as stories do when they arrange the flow of events so that they carry meaning. Yet passing time is not, for him, simply loss or decay. He contends that it contains something irreducible, an outside to thought that must nonetheless be put into words.