Time and Intellect in Aristotle

Abstract

In this article, it will be sought to elucidate the relation between time as a number of the movement according to the before and after, and the intellect as enumeration agent. The main target is to propose a new interpretation of the controversial passage in the 14-chapter, Book IV of Physics, where the relation between soul and time is established. For this, the divine conception of intellect will be introduced, seeking to suggest consequences that can be crucial at the moment of considering time and his relation to divine soul, always in act. The target then will be to justify that in the same way God is a condition of possibility of the catchment of the first principles and intelligible (as he says in DA), He also is a condition of time as the source of general enumerability, or what we will call “potential” time. The article structure consists in a brief exposition of the Aristotelian conception of time, and later thematize the notion of intellect as the agent in charge of the enumeration process that constitutes time, with the interpretative suggestion that identifies the agent intellect with the Aristotelian God. Finally, the relation between time and soul will be problematized to, along with the previously exposed background, explore an interpretation about the diverse modes of considering the existence of time and the place that the intellect takes as an agent of condition of possibility for her effective existence.