Time as Relevance: Gendlin's Phenomenology of Radical Temporality

In this paper, I discuss Eugene Gendlin’s contribution to radically temporal discourse , situating it in relation to Husserl and Heidegger’s analyses of time, and contrasting it with a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that draw inspiration from, but fall short in their interpretation of the phenomenological work of Husserl and Heidegger. Gendlin reveals the shortcomings of these approaches with regard to the understanding of the relation between affect, motivation and intention, intersubjectivity, attention , reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness, the basis of mathematical naturalism and sensori-motor models of behavior. Gendlin traces the weaknesses of these approaches in the above areas to the way these perspectives construe time.