The late Platonist philosopher Damascius both reassumed and rejuvenated the rich and
long-established Greek thinking about time. In distinguishing between different perceptions of
time by Plato Aristotle and his Neoplatonist predecessors Damascius offered novel
perspectives which can be seen as anticipating modern and contemporary theories of time such
as McTaggart's series and presentism. The greatest merit of his philosophy of time however is
his deep reflection on what it is for a living being to have its being in becoming - as it
happens with us human beings - and how this relates to stillness temporality and
temporalization. Time is interpreted by Damascius not merely as a concomitant of the celestial
motions nor as an abstract entity existing in the human soul but as a power of ordering
which is active at different levels. Damascius' time comprises the biological and the
historical time but is also the time that pertains to the essence and the activity of heaven
in which there is neither past nor future. The present book explores the richness of Damascius'
thought by going into the fundamental concepts of his philosophy of time: the indivisible now
and the present time the flowing now and the non-flowing now the flowing time and the whole
of time in which past present and future coincide. Damascius fully developed his thoughts
about time in his treatise On Time which is lost. The preserved fragments of this treatise are
translated and annotated in an Appendix.
