Time
Time has frequently struck philosophers as mysterious. Some have even felt that it was incapable of rational discursive treatment and that it was able to be grasped only by intuition. This defeatist attitude probably arises because time always seems to be mysteriously slipping away from us; no sooner do we grasp a bit of it in our consciousness than it has slipped away into the past. This entry will argue, however, that this notion of time as something that continually passes is based on a confusion.
St. Augustine's Puzzles
The apparent mysteriousness of time can make puzzles about time seem more baffling than they are, even though similar ones arise in the case of nontemporal concepts. St. Augustine, in his Confessions, asks, "What is time?" When no one asks him, he knows; when someone asks him, however, he does not know. He knows how to use the word "time" and cognate temporal words, such as "before," "after," "past," and "future," but he can give no clear account of this use. Trouble arises particularly from the form in which he puts his question: "What is time?" This looks like a request for a definition, and yet no definition is forthcoming.
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