What Time is It? Greek, Iranian, and Arabic traditions (210048-SS 2025)

Time is mysterious, but it is also something universal and common to all humanity; it has been discussed throughout history and across the world, and it is discussed in religious, philosophical, and scientific literatures. Time is something that multiple methodological perspectives can approach and can understand it in different ways. Our contemporary disciplinary distinctions are recent, though, and ancient perspectives do not always fit neatly into “religious” or “philosophical” categories. For this course, we will examine primary sources by some of the most important and influential thinkers in human history, but we will not always be able to categorize their writings as strictly religious or philosophical.
So, our focus is twofold: our primary focus will be ancient authors and their views on time, and our secondary focus will be on the methodological and disciplinary distinctions between philosophy and religion.
For this, we will look at ancient Greek theories of time. We begin with the very influential Aristotle, and look at how his theory of time was incorporated into the work of Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, and Simplicius, one of the last pagan Neoplatonists. From Greece, we transition to Iran and look at the cosmological function of a god of time, polemically described by an Armenian Christian, then we see how Zoroastrian theologians describe time’s cosmological importance. Next we look at three Zoroastrian philosophical texts, Dēnkard III, the Škand-Gumānīg Wizār, and the Ulamā-yi Islām, and see how Zoroastrian philosophers adapt and respond to Greek ideas. Finally, we transition into the Islamic world, looking at two heretics, who were surprising close to Zoroastrian ideas, and the most important Islamic philosopher : Ibn Sīnā, who creatively reconstructed the Aristotelian theory of time into a version that influenced all Islamic as well as European philosophy.
The seminar is aimed at MA and advanced BA students. Attendance, active participation in the discussions, the study of the literature provided for the sessions, and their presentation in the course are compulsory in order to acquire the corresponding credit points.