ABSTRACT
One of the most famous debates in the intellectual history of time and space took place in the seventeenth century between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. For Newton, greatly influenced by the invention of the clock, space was like time: If the clock showed that time existed independently of events, then the same was true of space. Newton viewed time and space as abstract, absolute entities that existed independently of their measurement, ie., their existence was absolute, for their reality remained real regardless of whatever they contained or how they were measured. He argued in 1687, for example, that “Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equally without relation to anything external” (quoted in Kern 1983: 11). Leibniz, in contrast, disliked the primacy of geometry in Cartesian thought, the implicit priority it assigned to space over time. Leibniz held that time and space were relational rather than absolute in nature, i.e., comprehensible only through frames of interpretation: distance, for example, could only be understood as the space between two or more objects situated in space. Space and time, therefore, had no independent existence in and of themselves, but were derivative of how we measured them. Eventually, for reasons having little to do with inherent intellectual merit and much to do with the emergence of early capitalist modernity, Newton’s view triumphed decisively and Leibniz’s relational space was “resoundingly defeated in the Enlightenment” (Smith 2003: 12).
