QuestionsDoes time really exist?Time exists only in the soul: the past is no more, the future is not yet
Does time really exist?Time is in the mind

Time exists only in the soul: the past is no more, the future is not yet

'If no one asks me, I know'; the distension of the soul (distentio animi)

Augustine of Hippo 354 · 430Believe to understand: God in the innermost self.
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What it claims

Time is not in things: it is in the mind. There are three times, but they are three presents of the soul: the present of the past (memory), the present of the present (attention), the present of the future (expectation). A long future is a long expectation, a long past is a long memory.

Why

The past is no more, the future is not yet, the present has no extent; yet we measure time, so it must exist in the mind.

The same idea through history
Aristotle330 BCAristotle is the first to ask: if only the soul can count, would there be time without a soul? He leaves the question open (Physics IV, 14). For him, time remains tied to motion, which exists in the world.
Augustine of Hippo400Augustine draws the conclusion: since neither the past, nor the future, nor the instant of the present exist in things, time is a distension of the mind, which remembers, attends and expects.
Immanuel Kant1781Kant keeps the idea that time belongs to the subject, but makes it the form of all intuition (inner sense), and not an extension of the soul that one measures.
In short

"Time exists only in the soul: the past is no more, the future is not yet" is an argument by Augustine of Hippo (Confessions, XI, 14-28 (c. 400), 400) on the question "Does time really exist?" (answer: time is in the mind). Its claim: Time is not in things: it is in the mind. There are three times, but they are three presents of the soul: the present of the past (memory), the present of the present (attention), the present of the future (expectation). A long future is a long expectation, a long past is a long memory. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Confessions, XI, 14-28 (c. 400)
Valid with an implicit premise

'What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I do not know.' In book XI of the Confessions, Augustine starts from this unease. The past is no more, the future is not yet, and the present has no extent: where can time possibly be? Yet we measure long and short times. His answer: time is not a thing of the world, it is in the soul, which holds the past by memory, lives the present by attention and awaits the future. This idea, taken up by Kant, Husserl and Ricœur, is one of the most influential in the whole philosophy of time.

P1The past is no more and the future is not yet. Neither of them is therefore something that is.
P2The present, if it had extent, would divide into past and future. It is therefore only a point that passes, with no extent. It cannot be long.
P3Yet we measure time. We say that one time is longer than another, or double it. This is no illusion: 'that I measure time, I know'.
P4 · implicit premiseWhat is measured exists somewhere: either in things or in the mind. It does not exist elsewhere, for instance in a 'time in itself' that would be neither in things nor in the mind.
So time is not in things: it is in the mind. There are three times, but they are three presents of the soul: the present of the past (memory), the present of the present (attention), the present of the future (expectation). A long future is a long expectation, a long past is a long memory.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where time is measured although it is neither in things nor in the mind: for example an absolute time that flows of itself (Newton's idea). This is why the whole debate turns on this premise.
Valid with P4, which is the hidden premise: whatever is measured must exist in things or in the mind. P1 and P2 take time out of things, P3 says it exists since we measure it, P4 concludes that it is in the mind. The rest of the conclusion (the three presents) is the positive description Augustine adds himself: it does not follow from logic alone, but from paragraphs XI, 20 and 28.
Analogy. When I recite a poem I know, the beginning is already gone, the end is not there yet, and the instant when I say a word is too short to last. Yet I feel that the recitation lasts. What lasts is my attention, which keeps the beginning and awaits the end.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Aristotle 330 BC · attacks premise 4

Time is 'the number of motion according to the before and after'. The before and the after are in motion itself, outside any soul: the soul only counts them. Aristotle notes that if only the soul can count, there would be no time without a soul, unless motion exists without a soul. He does not decide, but he does not place time in the soul.

Augustin replies
see the argument
A
Augustine 400 · Augustine's reply
Augustine refuses to identify time with the motion of a body: we measure motion by time, so time is not motion.
The debate goes on (our summary) This reply targets the thesis that time IS the motion of the stars (XI, 23-24). It does not answer Aristotle's formula, 'number of motion', which Augustine does not cite: Aristotle does not say that time is motion, but what is counted in it.
Immanuel Kant defender of the argument · 1787
Kant argues that time cannot be an order inherent in things: such an order could not precede objects as their condition, nor be known a priori. For him, time is the subjective condition of our intuitions.
see the argument
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: Aristotle himself hesitates about the role of the soul. The core disagreement is about the nature of the before and the after: a property of motion in the world (Aristotle), or an order the mind puts on what it retains (Augustine). Kant will side with the mind, saying that time is not an order inherent in things.
E
Edmund Husserl 1905 · attacks premise 2

Husserl opens his lectures on the consciousness of internal time (given in 1905, published in 1928) with a tribute to Augustine: he was the first to feel the difficulty. He accepts that time shows itself in consciousness, but he corrects the idea of a present without thickness. When I hear a melody, the lived present keeps the sound that has just passed (retention) and opens on the next one (protention). Retaining a sound that has just passed is not the same as remembering it afterwards.

Augustin replies
A
Augustine 400 · Augustine's reply
Augustine grants that the present passes in a point without extent, and yet that attention lasts: it is through attention that what is to come becomes absent.
The debate goes on (our summary) Augustine thus already sees that attention lasts, but he does not distinguish retaining a sound that has just passed from remembering it afterwards: that is Husserl's distinction. Husserl does not reject Augustine's thesis: he makes it more precise.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: Husserl extends Augustine more than he contradicts him. Both place time in consciousness. The disagreement is about description: a present reduced to a point (P2 taken literally) or a 'thick' present, made of what has just passed and what is coming.
P
Paul Ricœur 1983 · attacks the conclusion

In chapter 1 of Time and Narrative I, Ricœur reads book XI as the great example of an 'aporia': Augustine's analysis shows a stretched time of the soul (the distension) and does not say how this time makes a whole, nor how it connects with the time of the world. For Ricœur, only narrative, which composes scattered events into a story, answers this difficulty. He will later draw narrative identity from it.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1983, after the author's death (430).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: Ricœur does not refute Augustine, he shows a limit of his thesis: the distension of the soul does not by itself explain the unity of time or its link with the clock and the calendar. Still open: does narrative suffice to fill this gap?