Criticism of the Relational Theories of Time

Abstract

Perhaps we can, in the first instance, make a threefold division of the accounts of time which have been given, for either time is movement, as it is called, or one might say that it is what is moved, or something belonging to movement,¹ for to say that it is rest, or what is at rest, or something belonging to rest, would be quite remote from our interior awareness of time, which is never in any way the same. Now of those who say it is movement, some seem to mean that it is all movement,² others the movement of the universe; those who say that it is what is moved seem to mean that it is the sphere of the universe; those who say that it is something belonging to movement, that it is the distance covered by the movement³ or (others of them) the measure,⁴ or (others again) that it is in a general way a consequence of movement;⁵ and either of all movement or only of ordered movement.⁶

From Enneads with an English translation by A. H. Armstrong, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1967, III, pp. 319–335.