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At the beginning of his essay, "Remembering the beginning", Hans Blumenberg cites a metaphysical argument that Aristotle made:

We cannot imagine a beginning of time. Such a beginning would be, already, within the structure of time. Aristotle drew the conclusion from this, that the world must be eternal, for without the world time would be unimaginable.

I do not know where Aristotle made this argument; but it reminds me of the style of argument used by some presocratic Greek philosophers. If a concept cannot be formed in the mind, cannot be expressed in language, the object must not exist -- my first reaction to this argument is that it gives too high a priority to the workings of consciousness over the being of the outside world. For implicit in the argument is the assumption that the boundaries of human imagination are a limit to the possibilities of what is real.

But a second thread of thought comes in here, pointing out that the "concept of time" is a part of human consciousness, not of the world. I wonder whether Aristotle's argument means to describe the nature of the concept of time, or of the phenomenon of time -- I'm pretty sure Aristotle did not differentiate between these; but when the distinction is introduced I think it becomes pertinent to ask what the aim of metaphysics is. I believe the aim of metaphysics is to clarify the relation between these two quantities.