The essay traces the stages of philosophical reflection on time identifying their progressive sedimentation. Despite the variety, even conflicting, of solutions, the perception that time is ultimately a form of relationship emerges as a common background. Time is the way in which this relationship is articulated. But if time is primarily inherent to finiteness, as modernity has shown us through the successive passages of the inescapability of the subject and of secularization, it follows that the relationship essentially constitutes the finite. At a metaphysical level, we could also read the relationship between essence and existence as a form of temporalization, as the way in which the eternal and temporal dimensions become part of a declination. That is, it invests the very nature of the thing and regulates the way it appears. All this suggests to us to conceive time as a form of articulation of the intemporal.
