Time in Renaissance Philosophy

Abstract

As a central dimension of the Human experience, the conception of time has undergone deep transformations during the Renaissance period, in relationship with global evolutions in European arts, sciences, and metaphysics. The Aristotelian definition of time as “a number of motion in respect to before and after” was challenged to open the way to an ontological determination of time, independent from motion and connected to the divine structure of beings in the universe. From Ficino to most innovative thinkers like Telesio, Patrizi. Bruno in particular introduced a relativistic perspective and showed that we should rather speak of a multiplicity of times. The reflection on the difference between time and duration has been another technical issue developed by Renaissance thinkers: since time was no more referred to the Ptolemaic cosmos, the concept of duration was used to designate the internal time of things and existing beings, as Suarez makes clear at the beginning of seventeenth century. This idea of time as an inner reality also had important applications in the field of literature and moral philosophy, as we see for instance in Shakespeare and Montaigne. Although Modern Philosophers like Descartes or Pascal seem to break with the scholastic approach of time, it is interesting to note that the pre-Newtonian concept of “absolute time” is rooted in Renaissance theories of time and the development of Copernicanism leading to the construction of a new reference frame, where the Suarezian “imaginary time” plays a central role.