The enigmatic reality of time : Aristotle, Plotinus, and today / / by Michael F. Wagner.

• Superior document: Ancient Mediterranean and medieval texts and contexts
• Author: Wagner, Michael F., 1952-
• Year of Publication: 2008
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Medieval philosophy, mathematics, and science.; Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic tradition ; v. 7.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (386 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

The nature and existence of time is a fascinating and puzzling feature of human life and awareness. This book integrates interdisciplinary work and approaches from such fields as physics, psychology, biology, phenomenology, and technology studies with philosophical analyses and considerations to explain a number of facets of the perennnial question of time's nature and existence, both in contemporary and in its initial classical Greek context; and it then explores and explains two of the most influential investigations of time in classical Western thought: Aristotle's, as presented in his Physics , and the (neo)Platonist Plotinus' in his treatise On Time and Eternity . Original interpretative perspectives are argued in both cases, and special attention is paid to Plotinus as partly responding to and critiquing Aristotle's account.

Table of Contents

Part I: Dimensions of time's enigma -- Is time real? -- Eleaticism, temporality, and time -- The makings of a temporal universe -- Pastness and futurity -- Synchronicity and asynchronicity -- Temporal pace and measurement -- Presentness, or the present -- Aristotle's real account of time -- Parmenidean time and the impossible now -- Cosmic motion and the speed of time -- Time as the motion of the cosmos -- Time as the cosmos itself -- Time as motion and all change -- Temporal cognition and the return of the now -- Real temporality in an Aristotelian world -- Does Aristotle refute eleaticism? -- Bisection argument I -- Bisection argument II -- Bisection argument III -- Plotinus' vitalistic Platonism and the real origins of time -- Temporality, eternality, and Plotinus' new Platonism -- Plotinus' critique of Aristotelian motion -- Indefinite temporality and the measure of motion -- Plotinus' neoplatonic account of time.