Coventry, United Kingdom

Space Structures

Language: English Studies in English
University website: www.coventry.ac.uk
Space
Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional continuum known as spacetime. The concept of space is considered to be of fundamental importance to an understanding of the physical universe. However, disagreement continues between philosophers over whether it is itself an entity, a relationship between entities, or part of a conceptual framework.
Space
Space. It seems to go on and on forever. Then you get to the end, and a monkey starts throwing barrels at you.
Phillip Fry, Futurama
Space
1. Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from external experience. For in order that certain sensations should be referred to something outside myself... the representation of space must already be there. ...this external experience becomes possible only by means of the representation of space.
2. Space is a necessary representation a priori, forming the very foundation of all external intuitions. It is impossible to imagine that there should be no space... Space is therefore regarded as a condition of the possibility of phenomena, not as a determination produced by them; it is a representation a priori which necessarily precedes all external phenomena.
3. On this necessity of an a priori representation of space rests on the apodictic certainty of all geometric principles, and the possibility of their construction a priori. For if the intuition of space were a concept gained a posteriori, borrowed from general external experience, the first principles of mathematical definition would be nothing but perceptions. They would be exposed to all the accidents of perception, and there being but one straight line between two points would not be a necessity, but only something taught in each case by experience. Whatever is derived from experience possesses a relative generality only, based on induction. We should therefore not be able to say more than that, so far as hitherto observed, no space has yet been found having more than three dimensions.
4. Space is not a discursive or so-called general concept of the relations of things, but a pure intuition. ...
5. Space is represented as an infinite quantity. ...If there were not infinity in the progression of intuition, no concept of relations of space could ever contain a concept of infinity.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Tr. (1922) F. Max Müller, pp. 18-19.
Space
Why are the heavens not filled with light? Why is the universe plunged into darkness?
Edward Robert Harrison, Darkness at Night: a Riddle of the Universe (1987), p. 1
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