Reviewed by:

• Space: A History ed. by Andrew Janiak
• Marius Stan

This is a book with a purpose: it aims to chronicle the life of a concept (space) from its birth in ancient Greece to its growth into centrality for early modern metaphysics, and its end with Kant, after whom classical space got displaced to a marginal position. The volume is commendable for its good balance of broad scope, depth of insight, and careful exposition. Its chapters impressively combine analytic sharpness with sensitivity to historical context and philological nuance. Moreover, the gender balance among contributors is admirably even. [End Page 343]

Barbara Sattler lucidly teaches us how the Greeks juggled a number of related ideas (roughly corresponding to our notions of place, region, position, and interval) yet without arriving at a concept of space qua global carrier of metric structure.

Marije Martijn gives a novel account of Proclus's elusive notions, imagination and intelligible matter. That greatly helps us see his enormous influence on posterity. He anticipated strikingly key parts in the space doctrines of Descartes, Newton, and Kant; and his kinematic foundations for geometry overlap much with the analogous views of Hobbes and Kant, who also thought that geometric figures are generated by the motion of points and lines.

Medieval doctrines of place and void span some twelve centuries, and presenting them usefully in one chapter would be hopeless. Edith Dudley Sylla wisely restricts her focus to Nicole Oresme and his milieu, but her account teaches a broader lesson. As they grappled with Aristotle's physics, fourteenth-century figures produced doctrines that anticipate visibly the early moderns' absolutism and relationism; strikingly, medieval distinctions and heuristics formed the background to debates about space and place well into the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence.

And yet, as Andrew Janiak points out in his chapter, from Plato to Suarez, the concept of space remained marginal; that began to change with Cartesian science. Experiments suggesting that vacua might exist; efforts to rethink the nature of geometry; and a new science of motion that (by the Law of Inertia) appealed to preferred directions in space—all these developments conspired to make space-concepts explanatorily fundamental, and central to theoretical philosophy: "thinkers such as Leibniz and Newton begin to treat space and its structure as worthy of philosophical analysis in a new way" (247).

Before Einstein, cognitive access to space was by two channels: geometry and vision. The latter posed serious challenges. It required theorists to reconcile two things: a metaphysics of how material facts (about the size, shape, and distance of things) make cognitive contact with an immaterial mind; and an epistemology of the mysterious inferential processes whereby the mind passes from two-dimensional evidence (patterns on a screen-like retina) to knowledge of three-dimensional spatial relations. Many took these challenges on between Euclid and Berkeley; thus, explaining them well is far from easy. Gary Hatfield does it with admirable skill: he presents the very indispensable elements and key historical junctures in the long quest for a coherent theory of vision.

Kant saw himself as the last early modern—the one who moved past difficult dilemmas by a third, better way. Michael Friedman's chapter vindicates that image. He gives a sharp reading of Kant's difficult thought that his doctrine of space fares better than Leibniz's or Newton's, and a quite novel account of God's relation to space (another early modern conundrum). Also difficult, though not for Friedman, was Kant's claim that space does not obtain for the things-in-themselves.

This volume will make an excellent companion textbook to a number of courses, especially surveys of the major periods in the history of philosophy, and introductions to the philosophy of space and time. It has two other virtues beyond its pedagogical merits. First, by spanning two millennia of doctrines, it shows nicely how metaphysical reflection feeds off of sources as diverse as basic physics, natural theology, and the physiology of vision—which in turn gave epistemology a chance to reflect on how we reconcile such...

审核人：

• 太空：历史编辑。通过安德鲁·贾尼亚克（Andrew Janiak）
• 马里乌斯·斯坦（Marius Stan）

这是一本有目的的书：它旨在记录一个概念（空间）的生命，从它在古希腊的诞生到它在早期现代形而上学的发展到中心地位，再到康德的终结，之后，康德将经典空间转移到一个空间。边缘地位。该书因其广泛的范围，深刻的见解和精心的阐述之间的良好平衡而受到赞扬。它的章节令人印象深刻地将分析的敏锐性与对历史背景和语言细微差别的敏感性结合在一起。此外，贡献者之间的性别平衡甚至令人钦佩。[结束页343]

芭芭拉·萨特勒（Barbara Sattler）清楚地教会了我们希腊人如何兼顾许多相关概念（大致对应于我们的位置，区域，位置和间隔的概念），却没有得出关于度量结构的全球范围载体的概念。

Marije Martijn对Proclus难以捉摸的概念，想象力和可理解的事物作了新颖的描述。这极大地帮助我们看到了他对后代的巨大影响。他预料到笛卡尔，牛顿和康德的空间学说中的关键部分将是惊人的。他的几何学运动基础与霍布斯和康德的相似观点大相径庭，后者也认为几何图形是由点和线的运动产生的。

中世纪关于空位的学说跨越了十二个世纪，而在一章中有效地提出这些学说是没有希望的。伊迪丝·达德利·西拉（Edith Dudley Sylla）明智地将重点放在妮可·奥里斯梅（Nicole Oresme）和他的环境上，但她的论述却教导了更广泛的一课。当他们与亚里斯多德的物理学作斗争时，十四世纪的人物产生了一些学说，这些学说明显地预见了现代近代人的专制主义和关系主义。引人注目的是，中世纪的差异和启发式思想成为有关莱布尼兹-克拉克书信中有关空间和位置的辩论的背景。

然而，正如安德鲁·贾尼亚克（Andrew Janiak）在他的章节中指出的那样，从柏拉图到苏亚雷斯，空间的概念仍然很有限。笛卡尔科学开始改变这种情况。实验表明，可能存在真空；努力重新思考几何的本质；以及一门新的运动科学（通过惯性定律）吸引了人们首选的空间方向，所有这些发展密谋使空间概念具有基本的解释性，并且成为理论哲学的中心：“诸如莱布尼兹和牛顿这样的思想家开始对待空间它的结构值得以新的方式进行哲学分析”（247）。

在爱因斯坦之前，对空间的认知进入是通过两个渠道进行的：几何学和视觉。后者提出了严峻的挑战。它要求理论家调和两件事：关于物质事实（关于事物的大小，形状和距离）如何与非物质思想进行认知联系的形而上学；以及关于神秘推理过程的认识论，大脑从二维证据（屏幕状视网膜上的图案）转变为三维空间关系的知识。许多人在欧几里得和伯克利之间接受了这些挑战。因此，要很好地解释它们并非易事。加里·哈特菲尔德（Gary Hatfield）以令人钦佩的技巧做到了这一点：在长期寻求连贯的视觉理论的过程中，他提出了必不可少的要素和关键的历史关头。

康德将自己视为最后一个早期的现代人，他以第三种更好的方式摆脱了困境。迈克尔·弗里德曼（Michael Friedman）的一章证明了这一形象。他对康德的困难思想（他的空间学说比莱布尼兹或牛顿的学说更好）的观点有清晰的理解，并且对上帝与空间的关系（另一个早期的现代难题）作了相当新颖的解释。尽管不是弗里德曼的事，但同样困难的是康德的主张，即空间无法为自己的东西获得空间。

该卷将成为许多课程的优秀伴侣教科书，尤其是对哲学史上主要时期的调查以及对时空哲学的介绍。除了教学上的优点外，它还有另外两个优点。首先，它跨越了两千年的学说，很好地展示了形而上学的反射是如何从诸如基础物理学，自然神学和视觉生理学等多种来源中产生的，这反过来又使认识论有机会反思我们如何调和这种观点。 。