In response to the philosophically contentious question, ‘What is time?’, Descartes posited a very original response. Descartes argued that material bodies have no capacity for temporal endurance thus God continuously sustains the material body at each successive instant. The material body itself enjoys only the property of spatial extension. Descartes, in his “Third Meditation” in his Meditations on First Philosophy, thus concludes that time is a re-creation, a form of sustenance.

Isaac Barrow rejected Aristotle’s link between time and change and asserted that time exists independently of change or motion. Barrow controversially asserted that time existed even before God created the universe. Thus, independent of God or change, time as measurable on a shmuck exists. Isaac Newton concurred with Barrow’s substantival theory of time, arguing that time and space create an infinite container in which all events occur. Newton asserted that whether or not events take place, the container does not cease to exist.


