Aristotle as A-Theorist: Overcoming the Myth of Passage

Two things are often said about Aristotle's treatment of time in the Physics. First, that Aristotle's considered view of time is intrinsically tied to a language of temporal passage heavily dependent on the A-series.¹ As such Aristotle's understanding of time is plagued with the perplexities that the A-series generates.² Second, that the series of puzzles that Aristotle treats in IV. 10, leading to the conclusion that time is non-existent, are left unanswered by Aristotle.³ Instead, after presenting the puzzles having to do with whether time is, Aristotle cannot move fast enough to his treatment of what time is, leaving the puzzles unresolved.⁴ In this paper we would like to look at these two issues together. Our thesis is that the puzzles about the existence of time discussed by Aristotle at IV.10 are generated by a particularly naïve version of the A-theory. Further, although Aristotle's answer to what time is incorporates elements of an A-theory of time, it manages to avoid just those particular puzzles discussed in IV. 10 leading to the conclusion of time's non-existence.

Our discussion is divided into three parts. First we provide an analysis of the puzzles raised by means of the commonplace ideas () mentioned by Aristotle at 217 b 31. This analysis will reveal that the puzzles are the consequence of a hypostatization of time, that is, the naïve notion that time has metaphysical status in its own right, in the way that a substance has, for instance. The hypostatization of time is what results when we ask questions concerning when the now exists and when the now ceases to be. We argue that these are questions that arise when the present is thought of as something that becomes, that is, that surges forward through history. Moreover, the problems brought to light by these puzzles are not left unresolved by Aristotle. Rather, Aristotle's considered view of time, piggybacking as it does on substances and their changes, would clearly avoid such a reification of time and hence the problems generated by it. In the second part of the paper we discuss Aristotle's view of the substrate of time, namely change, and show why Aristotle argues that change must be thought of as following a magnitude. Using our discussion in section 2 as our basis, in the third and final section we discuss the significance of Aristotle's theory of time as that which results when we measure one change by another. Our discussion in sections 2 and 3 is geared towards an exploration of how Aristotle's own theory avoids a commitment to pure temporal becoming as real, that is, the idea that the now moves through a fixed continuum along which events are arranged in chronological order. The fact that this denial is an implication of his theory is closely linked to Aristotle's solution of the aporias in IV.10.

1. The

The arguments presented in IV.10 concern difficulties arising from common sense views of time. We will argue that these puzzles are the result of a reification of time. Resulting from naïve conceptions of time, they dissolve once these have been replaced by Aristotle's ensuing demystified account of the nature of time. Two things stand out as important in this regard. First, Aristotle's definition of time involves number, and as Aristotle notes at 223 a 22 ff., number exists only insofar as there is a soul that counts. That Aristotle conceives of time as involving a soul that counts should alert to us to the fact that Aristotle does not conceive of time as something that, of itself, marches along a preexisting continuum, first privileging one moment and then another. Second, insofar as the substratum of time is that which is countable in the before and after in change, time is, as it were, a characteristic of substances undergoing change and is not an explanatory condition of their changing. Time is not a necessary condition of change; but rather...