Space, Time, World

by Michael Fortescue

231 pages, Hardcover

Published February 5, 2024

Reviews

[Lachlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This wonderful book, despite running to little over 200 pages, can be fairly described as ‘compendious’. The author, with unerring authority, takes the concepts of space, time, world, being and other staples of millennia of philosophical speculation and turns them this way and that, through multiple dimensions, revealing with evidence from scores of languages spoken across the globe how human beings have come to understand the environment in which they live their lives. Each of the 18 chapters is suitable for an hour’s read, to be followed by another hour of the thoughts it has inspired. There are chapters on Einsteinian and quantum physics, on the ages of deep time, on the fictional world(s) of a Chekhov play, on a boy’s growing understanding of his village, on how different linguacultures ascribe dimensions to their surroundings, and much more. Everything is brought together under the aegis of Popper’s three worlds, the world of physical objects and states, the world of mental states and processes and the world of thought, culture, and the products of human creativity. Any review of this length cannot do justice, of course.