time has been considered, in philosophic terms, as one of the fundamental categories of experience, or reality; and one particularly concentrated burst of philosophic speculation on its subject came at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, from a school of philosophy known as phenomenology. If the propositions of the phenomenologists – Husserl, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger – still have resonance for us today, it is because they tried to analyse perceptions of time as a function of consciousness and subjectivity, rather than an absolute, objective reality.
