Abstract

Professor Lucas has written what is perhaps the most trenchant, sophisticated, and comprehensive treatise on time and space to have appeared in a long while. The book is distinguished not only by its acute treatment of the mathematical and physical concepts constituting its subject but also by a meditative quality all too rare in philosophical works dealing with the unquestionably fundamental and complex themes of time and space. The book is a phenomenology or morphology of time and space in that it is a foundational analysis of the philosophical, mathematical, physical, logical, and theological aspects of our understanding of these concepts. The work is organized into five general sections each of which is internally refined with a keen sense of what is essential to the particular context of discussion. The first section investigates "Time by Itself" through reference to such notions as instant and interval, the topology and direction of time, cyclic time, permanence and omni-temporality, and the mathematical ideas of denseness and continuity.