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c. 535–475 BCE · Ancient GreekHeraclitus
Everything flows; you cannot step into the same river twice.
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c. 515–450 BCE · Ancient GreekParmenides
What-is cannot change; time and becoming are illusions of the senses.
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c. 428–348 BCE · Ancient GreekPlato
Time is “a moving image of eternity”, created with the heavens.
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384–322 BCE · Ancient GreekAristotle
Time is the number of motion with respect to before and after.
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c. 563–483 BCE · IndianGautama Buddha
All conditioned things are momentary; the self too is a stream.
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354 – 430 · Patristic & MedievalAugustine of Hippo
“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it, I know not.” Time exists in the soul as memory, attention and expectation.
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1564 – 1616 · British & IrishWilliam Shakespeare
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day.
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1724 – 1804 · German-languageImmanuel Kant
Time is not a property of things in themselves but the form of our inner sense.
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1770 – 1831 · German-languageGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Spirit unfolds in history; philosophy comprehends its own time in thought.
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1844 – 1900 · German-languageFriedrich Nietzsche
What if everything returned eternally, exactly the same? The gateway called “Moment”.
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1889 – 1976 · German-languageMartin Heidegger
Dasein is temporal through and through — thrown from the past, projecting toward death; Being must be understood in terms of time.
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Explore Next
related by shared connectionsBeing vs. Becoming
The first great quarrel in Western philosophy — is reality one and changeless (Parmenides) or everlasting flux (Heraclitus)?
What Can We Know?
The relay race of epistemology — from Plato’s Cave to Kant’s categories, via Descartes’ demon and Hume’s billiard balls.
What Is Beauty — and What Is Art For?
From Plato’s ladder of love and Aristotle’s catharsis to Kant’s disinterested pleasure, Schopenhauer’s music and Nietzsche’s Apollo and Dionysus.
What Is the Self?
From ātman to anattā, from the cogito to the bundle, from Kierkegaard’s task of becoming oneself to Sartre’s nothingness.
The Pre-Socratics
The first Greek philosophers — from Thales to Democritus — who asked what everything is made of and replaced myth with argument.
What Is the Meaning of Life?
Liberation, virtue, tranquillity, God, the will, revolt — the great answers to the greatest question.