Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The dissertation examines the temporal theories of Aristotle and the Muslim Aristotelian, Ibn Sînâ (Avicenna). After considering Aristotelian science and sketching Aristotle's theory of physics, the dissertation picks up a series of puzzles concerning the reality of time. The central puzzle is a dilemma, which seemingly shows that the now can neither change nor remain the same. The dilemma is important, since one's solution to it affects the way one envisions time. Aristotle's solution, I argue, is to show how the now remains the same. Thus he adopts a “static” theory of time, i.e., time is a magnitude marked off …