Aristotle’s Ontology of Time

Based on Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, and Categories, the paper systematically analyzes his views on the nature and properties of time and the human’s capacity to know them. We show that Aristotle’s concept of time is a synthesis of metaphysical (speculative) and scientific (instrumental) approaches to the concept of time. The specific character of Aristotle’s epistemological strategy also includes the aspect of the pre-theoretical, everyday knowledge that Aristotle recognizes as reliable because of the commensurability of man to the world. The paper focuses on the following questions of Aristotle’s concept of time: the relationship between time and eternity, the origin of time, the reality of time, the relationship between time and motion, the idea of continuity/discontinuity of time, interrelationship of the modes of time, the ontological essence of the time moment (“now”), and time as a border. Certain questions are examined in the context of Aristotle’s polemics with the Eleatics and Plato; others, particularly the problem of “inner time” of things, are raised for the first time. Finally, we suggest a solution to Aristotle’s well-known paradox of the absence of time because the past no longer exists, the future does not exist yet, and the present is only a moment without duration. According to Aristotle, the point “now” does not deprive the present of reality; on the contrary, it confirms this reality. If, in addition, the point “now” is a point of reference (a boundary) for other modes of time, it serves as an ontological ground for the existence of time as a whole.