ABSTRACT
The concept of time has often been thought to be like that of space. In many ways, the spatial metaphor is misleading, but it is not totally misconceived. For the argument goes from time to space, not from space to time. We develop our concept of space by analogy with time, not vice versa. Space is like time, but time is, in important ways, unlike space. This chapter argues from the concept of time to the concept of two things being qualitatively identical but numerically distinct. The order of argument is time-things-space. It should be contrasted with the seventeenth century approach of Isaac Barrow, for whom the order was things-time-space, and with that of much of modern physics, which starts with space-time and introduces things, if at all, as merely a special sort of field.
