The central component of Suárez’s account of time in DM 50.8-11 is the metaphysical notion of duration understood as permanence in existence and as belonging to every real being in its actual existence. Suárez associates different kinds of duration with the different modes of existence displayed by real beings. The mode of existence relevant to time is that of successive beings: time is the duration of successive things, that is, of change. Suárez’s ambitious project is to offer a “metaphysical deduction” of time from the notion of duration. In this paper I analyze two fundamental aspects of this project: the existence of time and its real identity with change. Suárez emphasizes that both the existence of time and its identity with change can be deduced from general properties of duration. However, he is also very much concerned to show that this deduction does not miss specific features of time.

The messianic religions that came to dominate this lived life of late antiquity made waiting central to their sense of temporality, as we have seen. As the poets of erotics have always known, there is certain headiness in the combination of fervour and deferral. Waiting, however, structures the sense of the present – the now – with a question of its value, its temporariness. ‘Who would deny that the present has no duration?’, asked Augustine. In the nineteenth century, William James tried to answer this anxiety about the duration and thus evaluation of the ‘nowness’ of the now with an empirical, experimentally tested answer: ‘the practically cognized present is no knife-edge’, he concluded, ‘but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched and from which we look in two directions into time’. It was possible to count in seconds, and then in fractions of seconds, a human experience of now, a breadth measured ‘from one five-hundreth of a second to twelve seconds’.