(Golitsis2023)
That time orders the duration of life—the sum of the “leaps of generation”, as he [Damascius] says—of a sublunary substance is a basic component of Damascius’ thought. That the sublunary time is shaped by a recurring extended but undivided ‘now’, which leaps along with the ‘leaps’ that make up the rotation of the heaven, is at the core of his notion of flowing time. Damascius distinguished, however, between different perceptions of time and offered novel perspectives, which can even be interpreted as anticipating modern and contemporary theories. […] This late Platonist was also the first to make a case for presentism, i. e. the view that there are no past or future entities, but this only with regard to the activity and the essence of the heavens. Damascius was an innovative philosopher. 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 temporality, temporalization, perpetuity and, finally, stillness.
Damascius was a Platonist and, what is more, a concordist Platonist: he thought that Aristotle’s philosophy does not contradict the philosophy of Plato. Still, he was a committed Platonist. He therefore philosophized about the sensible realm of human experience on the assumption that it is the faithful image of an extremely complex intelligible model, which only the pure human intellect could access, albeit with labour. Inspired by Iamblichus, Damascius thought that time has an ordering power, which enables a generated living creature to have its being in becoming. In doing so, time indeed emerges as an image of eternity. It is in virtue of time that a generated living being, like each one of us, comes to be until it perishes. It is in virtue of eternity that a non-generated living being, like any intelligible form, is. As he also did with place, Damascius undertook to discover the essence of time by considering its utility. In doing so, he reversed the methodological primacy of essence, established by Aristotle. Damascius contended that, just as the model of time, i. e. eternity, is necessary for the well-being of the intelligible forms, so time is necessary for the well-being of the common form that inheres in all generated and perishable substances. Duration, spatiality and plurality are types of disintegration that pertain to whatever departs from the intelligible existence. Number, place and time are thought by Damascius to intervene as measures in order to bring about unity and order in the bodily world.
Nevertheless, as in other domains of his philosophy, Damascius went with his theory of time well beyond this kind of Platonic dualism. He thought that midway between time as a uniting power of the durative existence of the generated substances and eternity as the timeless existence of intelligible forms, stands not only the flowing time that runs along with the rotation of the heaven, but also a time that is “everlastingly totally present”, a claim to which even his pupil Simplicius did not consent.