of time lines and duration: the language and philosophy of time

TENSE VS ASPECT:

The English language (but not only the English language) does not really have a 'tense system' for its verbs: rather, it's all about aspect, whether the continuous/progressive aspect or the perfect aspect:

Each verb tense represents a different subjective view of time, and all of the different uses of a particular verb tense can be connected back to this same view. For example, the present perfect can be used in a number of different situations, but all the usages have a unifying characteristic - each use indicates that the speaker is looking back at a past event from the perspective of the present.

Jay Doubleyou: grammar workshop

There are two tenses in English, the ‘present’ and ‘past’ tense; these are the only verbs forms that do not require an auxiliary. We add further meaning and viewpoints to these basic forms through the use of aspect. Aspect allows the speaker to interpret the events being described and express how they view them.

Tense vs aspect – Collins

With much more here:

Grammatical aspect - Wikipedia

And here we get into very complex territory:

Tense and Aspect (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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TIMELINES AND TABLES:

To what extent, then, can we rely on what the grammar books show us?

The following are the norm - but are really not helpful as they do not reflect how the English language is used - or, indeed, how humans perceive the flow of time (see below):

All the English tenses, timeline

Verb Tense Timelines - Learn English Grammar

The problem with these schemes is that they don't represent the way the English language represents time.

English is not Latin - or a Latin language - with its very fixed table of tenses:

How English became English – and not Latin | OUPblog

There is no future tense in English:

Why doesn't English have an inflected future tense? When did such a tense last appear in the history of the English language, or if it never existed during the process from the PIE to English, where did it come to Latin from? - Cult of Linguists - Quora

But, then, philosophically, we can say that the future is not a reality - and is only something seen from the present. Again, a question of aspect:

Jorge Luis Borges Quote: “The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.”

For example, the 'going to' form is not a 'future form' any more that 'want/hope/plan' to are. The 'going to' form is an exact mirror image of the present perfect - looking forwards from now, rather than looking backwards from now:

Joel Swagman (Reviews / TESOL): The English Verb by Michael Lewis

"What's wrong with grammar teaching ?" - Persée

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF TIME:

A lot of this confusion has to do with how we perceive 'time' - and there are many different ways to do that:

Two contrasting viewpoints on time divide prominent philosophers. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe – a dimension independent of events, in which events occur in sequence. Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time.[46][47]

The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of "container" that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that "flows", but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz[17] and Immanuel Kant,[48][4^9] holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be travelled.

Time - Wikipedia

Arrow of time - Wikipedia

Eternalism (philosophy of time) - Wikipedia

Philosophical presentism - Wikipedia

Philosophy of space and time - Wikipedia

And we can get really quite deep into all of this:

Time (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The Experience and Perception of Time (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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DURATION

This is an understanding of time which 'goes against' the science of Newton (and Einstein) but which seems to accord with how humans (and other creatures?) see time: again, it's a question of aspect:

Duration (French: la durée) is a theory of time and consciousness posited by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson became aware that the moment one attempted to measure a moment, it would be gone: one measures an immobile, complete line, whereas time is mobile and incomplete. For the individual, time may speed up or slow down, whereas, for science, it would remain the same.

Duration (philosophy) - Wikipedia

Our temporal experience of the world is not divided into a series of neat segments, yet that's how we talk about time.

Why philosopher Henri Bergson rejected the word "time" - Big Think

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and his ideas about human experience of time passing and how that differs from a scientific measurement of time, set out in his thesis on 'Time and Free Will' in 1889. He became famous in France and abroad for decades, rivalled only by Einstein and, in the years after the Dreyfus Affair, was the first ever Jewish member of the Académie Française. It's thought his work influenced Proust and Woolf, and the Cubists. He died in 1941 from a cold which, reputedly, he caught while queuing to register as a Jew, refusing the Vichy government's offer of exemption.

In Our Time - Bergson and Time - BBC Sounds

We don’t really experience life as a succession of separate conscious states, progressing along an imaginary line. Instead, we feel time as a continuous flow, with no clearly demarcated beginnings and ends. We should not therefore confuse an abstract, arbitrary notion of practical convenience with the underlying truth that is continuously confirmed by our own experience.

Henri Bergson and the Perception of Time | Issue 48 | Philosophy Now

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