| Summary: | This article is based on the fact that James analysis of the consciousness of time (The Principles of Psychology, XV-XVI ) was a fundamental source common both to Husserl´s and Wittgenstein´s meditations on time, the specious present generating both Husserl´s ursprüngliche Zeitfeld and Wittgenstein´s Fliehende Gegenwart of 1929. It then examines the possibility of understanding the relation between Husserl´s and Wittgenstein´s concepts of time at the level of their respective appropriations of James´ analysis. I initially sustain that these appropriations meet in the critique of James´ presentism (Only the present is real) and in the idea according to which memory is a present copy-image. I also argue that anti- psychologism gives way, nevertheless, to very different developments in Husserl and Wittgenstein. Indeed, the aim of the former is to purify the phenomenological nucleus of James analysis of its psychological residues to reveal what he teaches us about the essential temporal ways of appearing. In a completely different way, Wittgenstein will question the image of the flow of present consciousness itself, by describing the genealogy of this image using errors in ordinary language. The result of this article is twofold: on one hand, if James´ analysis is really a common source of Husserl´s and Wittgenstein´s reflexions on time, in the end it results in almost opposing conclusions. On the other, the James-Husserl-Wittgenstein debate allows the confrontation between the psychological, phenomenological and grammatical approaches of time and, in this way, specifies this last in particular.
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