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12 - Time, Space, and Infinity

from III - Natural Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2009

By
T. M. Rudavsky
Edited by
Steven Nadler  and
T. M. Rudavsky
Steven Nadler
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
T. M. Rudavsky
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Summary

INTRODUCTION

The development of the concepts of time, place, and the continuum in medieval Jewish philosophy involves three sets of issues. The first issue has to do with divine omniscience from the perspective of the apparent discontinuity between past and future. Clearly the past appears to be fixed in a way that the future is not. More bluntly, the past is actual whereas the future is possible. From the divine perspective there is no ontological difference between past and future: All events exist in an “eternal now” for God, and so what is possible from the human perspective is actual from God’s eternal gaze. A second issue is related to the notion of creation. Traditionally, God the Creator is said to be eternal, or outside of time, whereas creatures are construed as being in time, or subject to the flow of time. By understanding the notion of creation and how an eternal, timeless Creator created a temporal universe, we may begin to understand how the notions of eternity and time function. A third issue, having to do with infinity and the continuum, leads to consideration of the notion of space (or place). The problem of infinite divisibility, which has vexed philosophers since the time of Zeno, centers on whether both time and space are infinitely divisible. If only one is divisible, we are left with a discontinuity between space and time, and yet if both space and time are infinitely divisible, then numerous paradoxes result, such as Zeno’s celebrated “Achilles and the Tortoise.”

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The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy
From Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century
 , pp. 388 - 433
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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