Abstract
In both the Arabic and Latin traditions, medieval philosophers discussed time largely by responding to Aristotle’s Physics. Though there are exceptions, like Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, most medieval philosophers agree with Aristotle’s account and try to solve problems and objections that can be raised about it. Several such problems appear in both the Latin and Arabic traditions. For instance, how does time relate to eternity, and is eternity, properly speaking, timeless? Again, Aristotle relates time to motion; but can time in fact be understood as something real distinct from motion? If so, time and motion are two distinct extra-mental things; if not, there is only a conceptual distinction between the two, so that they are essentially one and the same extra-mental thing viewed in different ways. Like motion, time is successive, and another problem that arises in both Arabic and Latin is how something can exist when its parts do not coexist simultaneously. Finally, Aristotle’s assumption that there is only one time is seen as problematic, because of the ontological status of the attribute of motion that Aristotle identifies as time. In thirteenth-century Latin philosophy, various solutions are adopted to save the unity of time, the most influential being that of Averroes.
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Adamson, P., Trifogli, C. (2018). Time. In: Lagerlund, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1151-5_498-2
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