Abstract

My paper is a philosophical comment on Plotinus' treatise "On Eternity and Time". My work is divided into three parts. In the first section I approach Plotinus' general argument for the dependency of time on eternity trying to demonstrate that it makes sense just within a Platonic framework. I argue that there are no evident reasons to assume the Platonic framework. Consequently, there are no evident reasons in support of Plotinus' argument. In the second section I focus on Plotinus' characterization of eternity. Notoriously, Plotinus holds that eternity is not a substance but a property. Particularly, Plotinus believe that eternity is a property of intellegibility. Now, while Plotinus' theory is untenable for the reasons I deal with in the first section, I defend the claim that his characterization of eternity phenomenologically grasps some important features of the ontological realm of being. Therefore I try to justify the thesis that eternity is not a property of intellegibility but the (first) property of (any) being. In the third and last section, I finally address the way in which Plotinus relates the generation of time to the being of eternity. I defend the Plotinian treatment showing that, given the viewpoint pictured in the second section, Plotinus' argument possesses robust experiential evidence.