What Kind of a Problem is the Problem of Time?

Aristotle begins his famous discussion of time in Book Δ of The Physics by asking whether time belongs to “the things that exist.” In this paper I argue that Aristotle’s apparently ambiguous answer to this question holds one of the keys to clarifying contemporary philosophy of time. First, I argue that the metaphysical and metaphilosophical presuppositions underlying most philosophy of time are deeply flawed. Second, that Aristotle provides us with a much more plausible alternative set of presuppositions about the nature of time. The Aristotelian conception of time as part of the subject matter of physics or “the philosophy of nature” is particularly illuminating. Finally, I examine several issues about the nature and reality of time often raised in the context of contemporary physics and show how the Aristotelian perspective can resolve those puzzles. Aristotle begins his famous discussion of time in Book Δ of The Physics by asking whether time belongs to “the things that exist”(τα οντα). He concludes that it does not or does so only in a tenuous or obscure fashion. Oddly enough, he follows this with an extensive discussion of what time is. If time does not exist, then how can it be anything? The answer to this conundrum is that Aristotle is an anti-Platonist but not an anti-realist about time. More generally we should understand that time exists as a mode of those things, for Aristotle substances, which exist in a fuller sense. This Aristotelian way of thinking about time has vital importance for a philosophy of time mired in Platonistic and metaphysical ways of addressing the problem of time. Even as the debates in the philosophy of time have moved away from an obsession with “the big kill” metaphysical argument, philosophers have continued to accept a meta-philosophical position that classifies the problem of time as a problem in metaphysics. In this paper, I argue that the general acceptance of this meta-philosophical position is the fundamental mistake bedeviling contemporary philosophy of time.