ABSTRACT
Aristotle’s account of time in Physics is at once fascinating and frustratingly obscure. In it, he discusses time’s relation to the present, to change, and to the mind. Aristotle starts out with a puzzle about whether there can be such a thing as time. Time seems to be divided into two parts, neither of which exists. The past is something that was, but is no longer; the future is something that will be, but is not yet. Aristotle also raises another puzzle about the now. Aristotle explains the relation between earlier and later “nows,” using an analogy. He compares the now to a moving thing. Aristotle defines time as a “number of change in respect of the before and after”. When Aristotle says that the before and after in time follows the before and after in change, his point is that temporal order depends on the pre-temporal orders of before-and-after series within changes.
