Abstract

Seventeenth-century authors frequently infer the attributes of time by analogy from already established features of space. The rationale for this can be traced back to Aristotle's analysis of time as ?the number of movement?, where movement requires a prior understanding of spatial magnitude. Although these authors are anti-Aristotelian, they were concerned, contra Aristotle, to establish the existence of ?empty space?, and a notion of absolute space which fit this idea. Although they had no independent rationale for the existence of absolute time, it seemed to go with absolute space, and they drew on a long tradition of space-time parallelism in securing this