Space, Time, and Deity: The Gifford Lectures at Glasgow, 1916-1918

by Samuel Alexander

This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1920 edition by Macmillan and Co., London.

Genres: Philosophy

791 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1920

About the author

There is more than one author by this name on Goodreads.

Samuel Alexander OM (1859–1938) was an Australian-born British philosopher. He was the first Jewish fellow of an Oxbridge college. Two key concepts for Alexander are those of an "emergent quality" and the idea of emergent evolution.

Reviews

[Aaron Michael]

“Another influence on Jack's thinking was the philosophy of Australian-born Samuel Alexander. The study of Alexander's only important work, Space, Time, and Deity, increased his distrust of introspection and modified his attitudes toward joy and the idealist philosophy. Alexander makes a distinction between enjoyment, which means experiencing something, and contemplation, which means thinking about it. Thus, one can enjoy a pain and later contemplate one's enjoyment of the pain. Likewise, a man can love a woman when he is with her, but not when he is merely thinking about her or his love for her. In Alexander's concept of contemplation, one has contact, not with the object, but merely with the idea of it. Jack applied this notion to joy. "I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could... lay my finger and say, 'This is it,' had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed." Yet he thought that joy must be the desiring of something outside the self, and he began to concentrate on that something. He became a follower more of Berkeley than of Hegel.”—George Sayer, Jack