Is Ibn Sina’s Theory of Time Compatible with McTaggart’s B-Series?
Abstract
Ibn Sina, indubitably one of the most essential philosophers of Islamic Philosophy, constructed a new account of time independently of Aristotle’s system, despite the major Aristotelian impact on his time. Whilst doing this in his book Kitab Al-Shifa, Ibn Sina also gave a proof for the reality of time based on certain notions such as motion, speed, spatial magnitude, and the capacity he calls “imkan” which is a divisible magnitude, possessing before and after essentially; and how “time” is required in order for these notions to gain meaning.
The question concerning the reality of time has attracted great attention from contemporary philosophers as well. J. Ellis McTaggart argued time to be an illusion in his highly controversial yet influential article “The Unreality of Time”. In this article and in his book The Nature of Existence McTaggart claimed that time is unreal on the basis that our descriptions of time are either circular, contradictory or insufficient. McTaggart constructed his disproof on two different ways to cite positions in time; one being the “A-series”, which identifies time as past, present and future moments, and the other being the “B-series”, which basically identifies time as earlier and later moments.
This study aims at answering the question whether the temporal system presented by Ibn Sina is compatible with McTaggart’s B-theory of time or not.
Keywords: Ibn Sina, Time, Spatial Magnitude, Imkan, Motion, McTaggart, B-series
Keywords
Ibn Sina,Time,Spatial Magnitude,Motion,Imkan,McTaggart,B-series
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