Clocks are widely perceived in European philosophy as a tool that distracts us from the deeper meaning of time. In this talk, I will share an analysis of the ways clocks have appeared, and disappeared, in three key works.

Interestingly, for all the threat it represents, the clock actually appears quite rarely in the texts often turned to for insights into the time of our lives. When it does appear, it is often dismissed outright or used as a narrative foil to get to the kind of time that the philosopher is more interested in.

One place that clocks do appear is in readings of the act of looking at the clock in order to tell the time. For the authors in question—namely Husserl, Bergson, and Heidegger—these readings serve to explain the relationship between objective time and their more complex accounts of subjective time.

For us, we will see how, in these readings, the types of clocks at stake and the kinds of temporal problems they are addressing have been overlooked by these philosophers themselves and in their subsequent take-up more widely.

We will use them, however, to draw out deeper understandings of the materiality of timekeeping and to articulate the way that multiple logics are embedded in the supposedly smooth, linear time our standard clocks tell.

The overall aim is to pique more interest in the clock as a device that can be redesigned to support different kinds of social and environmental ends.