Time from philosophy: reflection on its existence

The concept of time is one of the most studied topics in philosophy. It is not surprising, since Our life happens in time, to the point that we risk saying that we organize ourselves and do things based on it.

But if you ask us what time is, we might doubt the answer. We invite you to explore, below, different philosophical perspectives on time, its existence or non-existence and our perception of it.

What is time?

We live in time, but we rarely stop to think about what it is. Maybe we don’t do it because giving an exact concept of what time is can be complex. However, Plato and Aristotle attempted to give a definition to this phenomenon.

For Plato, time is the moving image of immobile eternity. That is to say, in this world in which we live, everything happens, everything flows and time is a copy of the world of ideas. The prototype it imitates is eternity, immobile because there is no beginning or end.

According to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, This thinker conceives time as a empty receptacle where things and events are put. In this sense, Plato proposes a absolute timewhere he is independent of the events that occur in the world.

For his part, Aristotle defines time as the quantity of movement according to before and after. According to a magazine publication Byzantion Nea Hellásfor Aristotle the present cannot be considered as if it were in time, since it is in continuous movement.

Everything we do in the now immediately becomes something past. So, the past is to the extent that it has already happened and the future will be, even though it is not now. This perspective of time is known as relativism.

Does time exist?

It may seem obvious that time exists, but if we think about it a little, it is not that simple. In this regard, the physicist and philosopher of science, Etienne Klein, in his book Does time exist? raises arguments in favor of the existence of three temporal phases: past, present and future.

The past exists because its traces are present in the now. For example, our adult self is the result of our past, as we were at one time babies and then children. Therefore, it is indisputable that there was a before adulthood.

The present, for its part, is usually considered as the most real time because our current life takes place in it. However, from a philosophical point of view, it may present differences and incommensurability in relation to the past and the future.

The future can be interpreted as not real because it is not yet. On this topic, Saint Augustine maintains that it is possible to consider this temporal phase in the present, because It is found in our consciousness. In this sense, its reality is in the form of fiction, that is, as a possible event that we want to happen.

Time as an illusion

An article published by Conicet explores the unreality of time for the British physicist Julian Barbour. For this one time as such does not exist. How to deny something that seems obvious? Don’t the hands of the clock move forward?

Barbour maintains that Movement is only an appearance and, therefore, the change that accompanies it is an illusion.. His postulate is that we live in a static reality.

Philosophy of science: the concept of time according to Newton

The physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton presented a conception of time that is similar to that held by Plato. The Colombian Journal of Philosophy of Science stands out in a text that, for the physicist, time is absolute and independent of external things.

By its very nature, time is a continuous and regular flow. This fluidity is in relation to himself and not to anything external. In the same way, Newton states that time is a necessary condition for change in bodies.. In other words, without time there would be no transformation, everything would remain inert and still.

Time in 20th century philosophy

One of the famous representatives of this theme is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. in his book Being and time, Published for the first time in 1927, it exposes its conception on this topic. Particularly, the Complutense University of Madrid published a work with an explanation about it.

For this the thinker, time is a continuous succession of “nows”. That is, it is a constant sequence of the present. This sequence extends over the human being, who is the one who feels that time passes and does not stop. This is why Heidegger considers that the subject experiences the passage of time.

However, it must be taken into account that when the philosopher speaks about time, he does so considering the mortal condition of the human being. Consequently, The passage of time has its effects on man: death.

Time perception

We see the hands of the clock advance, second by second, minute by minute. We might think that this is a way of perceiving time, but is it really like that? In this regard we have two things to say. The first is that the perception of time cannot be done through the senses. We do not see, touch or smell time, it just passes and passes.

Therefore, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy It stands out in an article that we perceive the duration of time. This form of perception is associated with memory, as the past and the future are in our mind.. In other words, we have memories of the past and we have possible ideas of the future.

The second thing is that our perception of time is a subjective condition of the individual. Based on this, in the magazine Future Today The concept of time is brought up in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

This philosopher postulates that temporality is a pure form of sensitivity. He calls it pure because it is before all experience with the external world. Therefore, it belongs to the subject and not to the objects. This way, time is a structure of human reason.

The enigma of time in philosophy continues

Today, There is no agreement on what time actually is. But we venture to expose some conceptions about him that come from different philosophers in history.

Still, it persists as an enigma that challenges us to explore new perspectives and rethink our existential conceptions.

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