Journal of the History of Philosophy

This is a book with a purpose: it aims to chronicle the life of a concept (space) from its birth in ancient Greece to its growth into centrality for early modern metaphysics, and its end with Kant, after whom classical space got displaced to a marginal position. The volume is commendable for its good balance of broad scope, depth of insight, and careful exposition. Its chapters impressively combine analytic sharpness with sensitivity to historical context and philological nuance. Moreover, the gender balance among contributors is admirably even. [End Page 343]

Barbara Sattler lucidly teaches us how the Greeks juggled a number of related ideas (roughly corresponding to our notions of place, region, position, and interval) yet without arriving at a concept of space qua global carrier of metric structure.

Marije Martijn gives a novel account of Proclus's elusive notions, imagination and intelligible matter. That greatly helps us see his enormous influence on posterity. He anticipated strikingly key parts in the space doctrines of Descartes, Newton, and Kant; and his kinematic foundations for geometry overlap much with the analogous views of Hobbes and Kant, who also thought that geometric figures are generated by the motion of points and lines.

Medieval doctrines of place and void span some twelve centuries, and presenting them usefully in one chapter would be hopeless. Edith Dudley Sylla wisely restricts her focus to Nicole Oresme and his milieu, but her account teaches a broader lesson. As they grappled with Aristotle's physics, fourteenth-century figures produced doctrines that anticipate visibly the early moderns' absolutism and relationism; strikingly, medieval distinctions and heuristics formed the background to debates about space and place well into the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence.

And yet, as Andrew Janiak points out in his chapter, from Plato to Suarez, the concept of space remained marginal; that began to change with Cartesian science. Experiments suggesting that vacua might exist; efforts to rethink the nature of geometry; and a new science of motion that (by the Law of Inertia) appealed to preferred directions in space—all these developments conspired to make space-concepts explanatorily fundamental, and central to theoretical philosophy: "thinkers such as Leibniz and Newton begin to treat space and its structure as worthy of philosophical analysis in a new way" (247).

Before Einstein, cognitive access to space was by two channels: geometry and vision. The latter posed serious challenges. It required theorists to reconcile two things: a metaphysics of how material facts (about the size, shape, and distance of things) make cognitive contact with an immaterial mind; and an epistemology of the mysterious inferential processes whereby the mind passes from two-dimensional evidence (patterns on a screen-like retina) to knowledge of three-dimensional spatial relations. Many took these challenges on between Euclid and Berkeley; thus, explaining them well is far from easy. Gary Hatfield does it with admirable skill: he presents the very indispensable elements and key historical junctures in the long quest for a coherent theory of vision.

Kant saw himself as the last early modern—the one who moved past difficult dilemmas by a third, better way. Michael Friedman's chapter vindicates that image. He gives a sharp reading of Kant's difficult thought that his doctrine of space fares better than Leibniz's or Newton's, and a quite novel account of God's relation to space (another early modern conundrum). Also difficult, though not for Friedman, was Kant's claim that space does not obtain for the things-in-themselves.

This volume will make an excellent companion textbook to a number of courses, especially surveys of the major periods in the history of philosophy, and introductions to the philosophy of space and time. It has two other virtues beyond its pedagogical merits. First, by spanning two millennia of doctrines, it shows nicely how metaphysical reflection feeds off of sources as diverse as basic physics, natural theology, and the physiology of vision—which in turn gave epistemology a chance to reflect on how we reconcile such...