“Matter tells space-time how to curve, and space-time tells matter how to move”

                                             - John Archibald Wheeler 
“The mind is time, the mind is space 
                           A horn rush, a bass flush for minds to taste” 
                                            - It’s Good to be Here, Digable Planets 
 

Where and When is Nowhere?
Imagining a person suspended in the air with no sense experience, Ibn Sina’ floating man experiment was originally posed to prove the existence of a self-aware immaterial soul without any empirical or sense-perceptible inferences. While idealism explains nature with reference to the constructions of the understanding and its experiences, materialism sees intelligence and its experience of space & time (hereafter S&T) as the product of their material facticity. By separating the intelligible knower from their empirical sensations and knowledge of both a body and a material world acting on them, the experiment isolates the idealist account of S&T from the materialist one. Isaac Newton’s materialist approach to natural inquiries understands sense-perception of an outer world to be the generator of valid inferences on the nature of S&T, and would deny the floating person a cognizable experience of S&T. Immanuel Kant’s strain of idealism understands S&T to be pure intuitions that filter in and would condition the floating person’s sensible experiences in the first place (A26, A31). While Newton’s classical mechanics based on an absolute conception of S&T remains useful in predicting the motions of large celestial bodies or your regular footballs, it falls short in describing the gravitational effects of high velocity particles and waves such as light. Albert Einstein’s general and special theories of relativity revitalized physics with the conceptions of S&T as relative to possible experiences within inertial systems, much to the credit of Kant’s conception of S&T as being sensible human modes of intuiting the actual world in which S&T are merely stubborn illusions (402). This paper will employ Ibn Sina’s thought experiment in order to answer the following research question: Can idealist views of nature offer the floating person an accurate relation to space and time without any experience of an outer world? 

The inquiry will be divided into four sections. The first outlines Ibn Sina, Kant and Newton’s positions. The second considers space and spatial relations; the third, time and temporal relations. The fourth section outlines a singular fabric of space-time and the dialectic between idealism and materialism in natural philosophy. Over the course of the second and third sections, I submit two principle arguments against a puritan idealism and for the necessity of a dialogue with materialist approaches to the investigation of S&T. The first contention lies in the floating person’s inability to differentiate between their inner intelligible world from the spatially extended void they float in and the temporal moment they are suspended in. This inability would offer the floating person inaccurate relations to space, whose limited sensory experience they would mistake as complete, and to time, whose linear and sequential experience of its passage would be confused as eternal and immanent. The second proposition is that if the pure intuitions of S&T of all conscious beings participating in material creation share some consistent essential features of their experience, then any idealist conception of S&T must consider the role of the material world in structuring our intuited experiences of S&T. I propose two shared phenomenological features between conscious finite beings, the appeal to a-temporal concepts as a way of abstracting the underlying nature of things-in-themselves and the experience of time as sequential and linear. Finally, I will outline Schelling’s program in his First Outline of the Philosophy of Nature as it seeks to reconcile and necessitate both the materialist and idealist’s investigations of nature. In response to the research question, this paper will conclude that natural philosophy must convene both the idealist’s theoretical inquiry into the mathematical formalism of nature, and the materialist’s deference to empirical evidence when studying S&T.

Ibn Sina’s Floating Person
Consider the following: a person appears suddenly in a void and is suspended from material experience. There is no light to see any objects nor their own body. The person is suspended in space to ensure they experience no physical forces such as gravity. The person has no memory of any sensory experience but they have a rational faculty. To some, like Ibn Sina it seems self-evident that the floating person would nevertheless be continuously and basically self-aware of their existence. To others, like Aristotle, without an external world to sense, and “light (phaos)” to offer the floating person’s “imagination (phantasia)” sight (429a33-34), consciousness is “actually none of existing things [,] nothing before it thinks”(429a23). Ibn Sina affirms however, that despite having no intuition of a physical world or body, the floating person would have no accessible testimony to ‘not being’. For the floating person this would mean that their conception of an existent self (wujūd dhāti-hi) isn’t dependent on their experience of a material body or a material space under an absolute clock. In this respect, Ibn Sina, much like Aristotle (429b6) accepts an idealist duality of mind and body. However he diverges from the ancients in treating knowledge of the soul and consciousness as existent prior and independently from a distinct and separate material creation. 

Despite treating matter and form as distinct but inseparable, Ibn Sina takes place and time to be characteristic of the formal nature of things in–themselves. Time for Ibn Sina is the capacity of moving bodies to cover more or less distance at a fixed speed and is shared by the heavenly bodies and terrestrial observers alike (McGinnis 1). The motion of these bodies in S&T “reflect the organizational structure of the matter…not its material but its formal structure” as it derives these instructions from the World Soul (Goodman 150). It seems for Ibn Sina that the question of whether the floating person’s formal character holds the capacity for temporality, is not so much a question of their material composition, nor their apriori intuitions, but their form’s provenance from a central Intelligence that acts either as a Prime Mover of causality, or as the living soul of an inhabited Universe that instructs the floating person’s matter how to organize itself according to S&T. In this sense, Ibn Sina doesn’t consider the matter of a person to imply their temporality, nor their conscious mind whose  “conceptual knowledge and mystical experience” he takes to be functionally a-temporal (159). Rather it remains a feature of the forms in which things-in-themselves organize themselves in, so long as they remain in a Universe organized by forms, the floating person would receive the qualifications of S&T. 

In contrast to Ibn Sina however, Kant holds that the floating person will have a pure intuition of S&T irrespective of their detachment from a World Soul.  In Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, he describes two sources of cognitions in the mind, sensuous intuitions and spontaneous concepts (A50/B74). Intuitions form through the human capacity to receive affective presentations from a world imparting information onto us. Concepts are universal presentations of objects of sensible intuition that we produce ourselves through our understanding (B75/A51). Kant’s account of S&T places these filters of experience in the former category as pure a-priori intuitions that precede and condition any sensory experience. Space is presented as “the subjective condition of sensibility” that makes outer intuitions possible for us in the first place (A26). While the pure intuition of time similarly shapes sensory experience as opposed to being derived through it (A31). Kant would undoubtedly ascribe the intuitions of S&T to the floating person despite being stripped from material reality. 

While Ibn Sina takes the floating person’s self–awareness to be self-evident despite the absence of empirical knowledge, Kant is committed to a dialect between empiricism and rationalism, to the synthesis of both sense-perceptible manifolds and concepts in the apperception of knowledge (B147). As a result, a-priori intuitions of things such as the floating person’s existence or even S&T, though universal and prior to experience, aren’t observable on some Platonic plane. Instead, they’re evidenced by the construction of reality by a knower’s sensible and rational faculties. Kant takes issue with Descartes and Ibn Sina’s “problematic idealism” in its supposition that “human consciousness is possible without awareness of an external world” (Goodman 158). Given that consciousness is ordered according to the pure intuition of time, its temporality is a sensible feature of its body rather than a self-sufficient consciousness. Thus for Kant, and the floating person, whether consciousness claims awareness of the bodily object or not, its temporality remains a feature of its sensory intuitions. For Ibn Sina S&T remain accessible to the floating person in the categories of pre–sensorial experiences alongside self-awareness, only insofar as they weren’t floating at all and had intuitive access to a world of forms. In that respect, Kant stands apart from Ibn Sina in positing that time doesn't structure things in-themselves in the outer world by means of their formal character. Rather, it is a condition of the experience of representations in the inner world. Time would be incapable of spilling into the outer world “any more than space can be intuited as something within us” (A23). Thus the floating person’s distinction between their inner sense and the outer world is crucial for maintaining accurate descriptions of how persons relate to S&T. 

Alternatively to Ibn Sina and Kants idealisms, the materialist and mathematical investigators of nature such as Newton view space and time to be “two eternal and infinite self-subsistent non-entities…which exist only in order to encompass everything actual” (B56/A40). In Newton’s scholium of the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica he distinguishes between absolute time and relative time. Much like a star has an absolute luminosity that determines its actual output of energy over time and an apparent luminosity that measures how bright the star appears to us, Newton considered time to have an objective and absolute measure of duration independent of any relation to the terrestrial observer (9). Similarly, Newton considered space to be absolute, an immobile cartesian space which contains parts of space that are movable and have measures relative to the position of the observer in absolute space (10). Under Newton’s materialist conception of natural philosophy, the floating person would not have access to any relative experience of S&T given that they have been stripped from the absolute space and time that encompasses this Universe. 

 

The View from No-Where 
Firstly, is the floating person thought experiment compatible with Kant’s conception of space? The floating person appears in a void, and yet for Kant there can’t be a presentation of ‘no space’ even if there are “no objects encountered in it” (B39). Even with no material objects to perceive and forces to succumb to, Kant would hold that the floating person would have an intuition of space. This idealist account considers space not as an empirical concept (B38) but rather an “a-priori presentation that underlies all outer intuitions” (A24). Despite appearing in a motionless void, the floating person’s mere existence as something other than what is outside of itself (B38) signals their presence in “one all-encompassing space” that precedes this person’s arrival (A25). In this respect, Kant distinguishes between space as it figures as an a priori pure intuition of space, and material or relative space. While material space is subject to motion, it “presupposes a larger material space for it to move in…and so on to infinity” (Kant 8). For Kant space is neither absolute as Newton would take it (A40), nor exclusively relational as Leibniz views it (B57). Rather, space “represents no property of any things in themselves” (A26), for it is only through the perspective of human experience, as forms of our sensibilities, that talk of S&T gain substance. The conceptual extension of space as the unified housing of contiguous objects capable of interacting on the same causal plane (A25) “is in itself nothing” but the condition on which movable spaces, and the floating person’s experience, are predicated on (Kant 9). 

The floating person doesn’t need to experience any empirical intuitions in order to have an intuition of pure space. Instead, this intuition acts as the condition of possibility for their sensuous experience of outer objects in the first place (B38). This awareness of a pure space that fields the walls of the floating person’s existence requires a distinction between their outer and inner worlds. Space is the condition for the extension of objects that “appear to us externally” rather than to all possible objects of intuition, or even the intuitions of different subjects (A27). Given that the floating person is unaware of their body as being distinct from the space around it, if they conflate their inner sense with the spatially extended world that houses it, the nature of pure space would be mischaracterized. They would take imagined objects and concepts to be actual and spatially extended. However, for Kant “space represents no property whatsoever of any things in themselves” (A26/B42). The floating person’s subjective experience of the pure intuition of space taken as objective and material space, would on the other hand, make that exact claim. An idealist is first introduced to material reality through the bodily object that is profoundly or artificially distinct from the immaterial subject poking and prodding its own matter. By distinguishing between the inner world from the outer material world, and in turn situating their essence in a bodily object, the floating person gains a sense-perceptible experience of S&T. 

The idealist view of space-time allows human imagination to depart from its limited sensibilities when abstracting from and hypothesizing on the nature of empirical events. A dialogue between idealism and materialism grounds natural philosophers in their experience of nature when abstracting from their senses by means of logical and mathematical formalism. It also orients investigators as subjects investigating the nature of objects in the world, rather than assigning too much authority to either the materialists’ limited inductive reasoning, or the idealist’s ambitious deductive inferences on the nature of S&T. Drawing claims from our inductive reasoning of empirical experience limits our experience of space to three dimensions (A25). Neither Kant nor the materialist could disagree that this experience provides an incomplete account for the whole of space-time. What instead we must reach is a view which recognizes the value of both idealist and materialist perspectives. One of the chief missions of modern speculative physics is to reconcile the mathematical inconsistencies between quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity. String theory provides a solution for these inconsistencies by positing that the most irreducible form of matter is composed of strings that vibrate along 10 or 11 dimensions. A purely empirical approach to space-time would be incapable of deriving these claims from empirical observation without acknowledging the observer’s limited three-dimensional experience of space. The purely idealist view on the other hand would neglect to conferr with the empirial reality of material nature when speculating on the characteristics of space-time that our sensibilities can only narrowly view.

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Indeed, Kant acknowledges that our pure intuitions of S&T are not wholly authoritative on the nature of S&T, simply that they’re the relevant starting point in their investigation. Kant argues that despite our pure intuitions of S&T being “valid for us universally”, we can’t make any judgment “about the intuitions of other thinking beings'' nor their limitations (A27).Without a human subject, our particular mode of space-time “would vanish” (A42). From the ideal perspective, S&T don’t exist in themselves, rather they’re conditions of our perceptions. If the floating person were to shrink to the subquantum level they would still be incapable of experiencing a 10 dimensional string given the limited view of three dimensional space that their senses impose. An empiricist would therefore be limited in claiming that their experience of space as three dimensional is a reflection of the nature of absolute space. Instead, such a though experiment commits us to the notion that subjective experience is limited by of our pure intuition of space. If the floating person were an extraterrestrial equipped with radically different sensibilities, their pure intuitions of S&T might offer alternative empirical insights through an experience humans can only hope to dream of. Alternatively, the extratererrestial’s experience might very well fail to offer novel insight due to some conditions that their existence within the spatio-temporal and material confines of this Universe imposes on their sensible intuitions. If that is the case, then the idealist view must necessarily contend with a material form of space-time which  itself structures pure a-priori intuitions as the condition of possibility for our subjective experience of S&T. 

If we can arrive at some material conditions that all conscious beings in the Universe are constricted by in their experience of S&T, the idea of pure intuitions of S&T would have to give way to an explanation which takes account of the material environment. offer some credence to the environment they’re formed in. In Thomas Nagel’s paper “What is it like to Be a Bat” he considers foreign phenomenologies. Specifically, Nagel conceives of their overlap and impenetrable conceptions by our imaginations limited to our experiences (441). Nagel considers that a martian scientist “with no understanding of visual perception” could understand and verify physical phenomena external to them despite experiencing it differently from humans (443). A human and a martian will both witness a star and have their unique intuition of this star, perhaps notice its color or luminosity. Now for an idealist such as Kant, “colors are not properties of the bodies to the intuition of which they attach” (B45). Rather, we perceive them as such because our presentations are formed through the sensory experience of light. A martian that experiences S&T through echolocation for example, would hold a different qualitative experience of the star. Nevertheless, both the human and the martian will eventually come to a consensus on the properties of the star in itself. Kant poses that “appearance always has two sides”, the object in-itself, bereft from the pure intuitions of time and pure space, and the sensuous presentation our sensibilities provide as conditioned by S&T (B55/A39). While a floating martian would hold sensibilities wholly different from ours, and experience S&T differently from humans, their description of the object’s nature in-itself would abstract from their subjective perception of it. Just as our concepts abstract from the intuitive conditions of time (B52), it can be argued that Martian concepts would have to necessarily be a-temporal as well. This would suggest the conceptual form of space-time in-themselves which all finite beings would accede to, is its absence. 

The View from No-When 
Kant argues that time is the form of our inner sense, “the intuiting we do of ourselves and our inner state” (B50), as well as the condition for consciousness and apperception. In so far as the floating person would be aware of their own existence, and view their inner states as sequential rather than simultaneous (B47), they will have a conception of time. All concepts of change, whether internal or external, are possible only “through and in the presentation of time” (B48). The absence of external motion to intuit, does not take away from the floating person’s changes of inner representations. If time was not an a priori intuition, but rather solely an absolute measure of universal duration, the possibility of reconciling the floating person’s being and “not being in the same place” would disappear given that change is the only measure in which a person can become (B48). Consider time as Newton does: material, universally objective and self-subsistent. Despite abstracting from the “subjective conditions of our intuition of it”, we would misrepresent our inner sense of time as evidence for the existence of absolute time in a motionless void. Despite the absence of “ an actual object [, time] would yet be actual” (A33). On the other hand, time loses meaning if all external events were reduced to simultaneous and indistinguishable frames of nothingness. In the static Universe of our thought experiment, the only instance of change, and thus the presentation of time, is housed in the mind of the floating person. 

 

In the previous section it was argued that the floating person’s inability to access an ‘outer world’ would draw them to take their limited experience of space to be wholly authoritative on the nature of ‘space-in-itself’. In the following section it is similarly argued that the floating person’s seclusion from motion, not only localizes their experience of time to their inner sense of consciousness, but it runs the risk of taking itself to be eternal and immanent. In this endless void, the floating person’s heartbeat is the first instance of being in this world of non-being. It cannot however, claim to be the First Cause of this world or of its own transportation to this void. Aristotle introduced the necessity of a self–subsistent Prime Mover on which the rest of material creation is merely accidental to in his Metaphysics. Aristotle posed that there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. There must be a first cause for all four types of causes, material, formal, efficient and final causes. If there is no first cause to initiate a causal series, all the parts become medial or intermediary causes, and consequently, “there is no cause at all” (994a19). If there was no determining principle for the floating person’s first heart beat in the void, a principle that is distinct from the chain of material causes that generated the floating person, then the process of the person’s creation would regress to infinity. For Aristotle something must have happened to originate creation, a Mover that is separate from perceptible things, indivisible and without parts, having neither an unlimited nor a finite magnitude. A Mover that is active, having the capacity to bring about all the movement posterior to it (1073a2-12) for an eternal duration of time (1072b24-25). How this First Cause – whether we consider it to be the essence on which nature-in-itself depends on, God or the philosopher conjuring this person into their thought experiment – experiences S&T from outside this void would differ greatly from how the person participating in its creation would. If the finite floating person, the sole inhabitant of this void, were to mistakingly consider themselves the First Cause of the void and their own creation, their presentation of time would innacurately take itself to be immanent at the least, and eternal at most.  

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Aristotle poses a clarifying puzzle that is readdressed in Al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers. When discussing this logically necessary and self-subsistent First Eternal Cause of being, Aristotle poses that everything that’s active is capable of being active and not everything that's capable of being active is active. It seems that capacity for activity precedes activity (1071b23-26). If the First Mover initiated the act of creating the Universe, then at another ‘time’ prior to this creation, They must have held the capacity to create the Universe. In his first discussion concerning the eternity of the world, Al-Ghazali questions whether this First Mover, taken to be God, could have created the Universe a few moments before it was created. If not than this would deny God the agency to create when They wish, if so then this would imply a change in the Mind of God which is impossible in this necessarily eternal and unchanging entity  (Averroes 13).  Was there a gap between the First Mover’s instance of creation and its potential capacity to create? In more thoughtful terms, how can an immaterial and eternal entity cause a material and temporal creation? Where or when do such categorically antithetical entities meet? Al-Ghazali, much like Kant and Einstein, pushes back against the relevance of the terms ‘where’ and ‘when’ as considerations for the Principle on which nature-itself is dependent on. From the ruling perspective on the natural order which the First Cause assumes, time and space aren’t real in themselves. From the outside of ‘material reality’ looking in, up and down, past and future, three or four dimensions, these tools that participants in creation use to situate themselves in it, are all respectively equivalent. Al-Ghazali argues, S&T only gain substance for an observer seeking to situate themselves in space relative to other objects and in the coursing time of their finite lives (67). By assuming the First Mover exists prior to material creation Al-Ghazali describes two historically prevalent attempts at reconciling the insolubility of these two mediums. The first conclusion held by Aristotle and Averroes, assumes that both the First Cause and the Universe must in fact be eternal. The second attempt to work through this puzzle, held by Plato and Al-Ghazali, viewed the world as being generated in time. While the latter solution remains more sound given our intuition that all material objects, including the planets and stars will eventually perish, it requires a few adjustments to our understanding of ‘reality’ and its generative process to avoid the problem of insolubility. The former on the other hand, is the kind of objectionable implication I raise against the floating person’s idealist conception of time when they are secluded from knowledge of their body, a changing material world and other subjective experiences of time.  

Both the martian and the human share in the material condition of their mortalities. They exist as beings locked in a transitive reality. They, just as the Universe they experience unfolding, have a beginning and a necessary end. The floating person’s linear experience of time seems to be a condition of their finite environment rather than their ideal presentation of time that Kant takes to initially “be given as unlimited” until we experience time as a direct intuition (B48). Martian and human intuitions, in their respective sensible forms, are “dependent on the existence of the object” in the outer world (B72). Despite being the sole inhabitants of their own voids, both beings would be incapable of producing their own manifolds beyond the pure intuitions of S&T. As the original cause and final grounds of nature, only God has the capacity to intuit and intelligize manifolds (B71). Kant poses that “time cannot be intuited outwardly” (A23) nor experienced empirically in a motionless void (B48/A33). Consequently, if the floating person were to take their inner sense of time as the sole and absolute clock of their personal voids, they would take their ideal subjective time to be material and objective. While this wouldn’t bother anyone, it would be an inaccurate illusion to view their linear and finite experience of time that they originally took to be unlimited (B48), as immanent and eternal. 

Aristotle’s cosmology considered that this Universe was comprised of “eternal movement [that] must be caused by something eternal” (1073a27). Even if the floating person was correct in taking their presentation of time in the void to be unlimited, the mortality of their material bodies and the form of their intuition of time as sequential and linear would limit them to a sempiternal understanding of eternal time.  Herder distinguishes between the sempiternity of time from its eternity, and in effect between transitive experience of S&T and an immanent one. Sempiternity is the conception of an indefinitely prolonged duration from the viewpoint of a linear experience of time (100). Eternity on the other hand is the a-temporal conception of infinite time. Whereas “the eternal can as little become time, as time become eternity, or the finite become the infinite” (99). The floating person, just as the world they inhabit would necessarily be transitive because they are “system[s] of things ordered in, and according to time” (100). In that respect, both an original presentation of time that takes itself to be unlimited (B48), and the transient and material world of empirical objects are taken to be in time. Contrastingly if God or a First Cause stood outside the confines of time, looking into the spatial and historical whole of this Universe like a book in Infinity’s Library, all spatio-temporal events would be simultaneous, pages in an old volume. All finite conscious beings would thus be unified in phenomenological experience in two respects. First in the appeal to a-temporal concepts as a means of determining the underlying nature of things in-themselves. Second in the sequential experience of time. This universal commonality of experiences, I conclude, implies that material reality is just as responsible in structuring the human a-priori intuitions of S&T, as the sense-perceptions of humans is responsible for reconstructing their experience of material reality. 

It Takes Two to ‘Space – Time’ 
From the perspectives laid out in this paper on the mutual dependence of the idealist and materialist approaches in the investigation of S&T, Friedrich Schelling developed a concrete method for the shifting tides of natural philosophy.  Schelling posits that a complete account of nature requires the interaction between the materialist and a transcendental idealist views. The synthesis of knowledge on space and time involves both a subject to inquire, and an actual object for valid inquiry. Materialism views nature as a product and is concerned with the empirical study of its objects (202). Thus for the philosophy of nature, the ideal is explained by the real (194). Nature invites consciousness to recognize a fabric of S&T that exists independently and outside of it. It aims at deriving theory from empirical observations of the “surface of Nature” and its observable forces through inductive reasoning (196). Idealism on the other hand, understands nature as productive and constructs theory to account for the internal clockwork and final grounds of matter (202). For transcendental philosophy, the ideal is subordinated by the real (194). This view begins the process of inquiry with an a priori hypothesis on a feature of space-time before testing it experimentally. 

These two explanatory directions are “not only equally possible, but equally necessary” (194). The idealist part of the natural sciences story inquires into the “absolute cause of motion” (195). These a-priori judgements are the sole means of absolute knowledge in the sciences (197). The materialist view ensures that these judgements are based in empirical reality. We can say we know a clock by empirically observing the time on its surface, but knowledge of the clock in-itself lies with its maker. The Clockmaker constructed the clock and is thus aware of the “principles of their possibility”, the necessary conditions for its functionality (196). How each of its cogs relate to one another and the “soul of the work” are captured because they were imagined potentially before being brought into actuality (196). Newton’s materialist view of time envisioned it as a universal clock that ticks independently of who hears it. When Einstein inquired into the necessary conditions for the experience of time, he found time to be relative, and S&T to be warped by matter and energy (Hawking 2).

Under this model for the natural sciences, Albert Einstein’s general and special theories of relativity challenged how the natural sciences conceive of S&T as absolute and the materialist methodologies that lead to such conclusions. Einstein was deeply motivated to incorporate Kant’s discovery that our presentation of the real external world rests exclusively on sense impressions” (Einstein 402). Every day thinking for both Kant and Einstein was a matter of sense impressions, ordered by concepts, the relations between those concepts, and the synthesis of concepts and sense experiences (403). While Einstein was committed to the idealists’ conception of S&T as pure a-priori inuitions as well as the stubbornly persistent material qualification of time, he also called on traditional physicists to engage in the “critical contemplation of the theoretical foundations” of nature (401). There is an epistemological limit that humans hold in being observers of nature, the relativity of their frames of investigative reference precludes physicists from directly experiencing the ‘absolute’ frame of reference of an inertial system, and thus from accurately and inductively inferring claims on its nature. 

Where Newton conceived of space as absolute and unmoving, Einstein amended that “motion from the point of view of possible experience” is always relative to an object in the same system of experience. The speed of a swimmer is measured relative to their position in the pool, the position of the sun is determined relative to the milky way (385). When Newton conceived of time as an absolute clock, Einstein challenged the illusion of simultaneity of events in regular experience. Prior to Einstein an inertial system that tracked a meteorite flying across the sky would assume that the astral event is happening at the exact same time as the observer experiencing it, according to one absolute clock. When Einstein and Point Carré defined a fixed speed of light c, which was previously and arbitrarily assumed to have an infinite velocity, the relativity of time became more evident (386). The meteorite and the observer aren’t encountering one another simultaneously, rather, light is taking a couple minutes to reach the observer from the meteorite. The further we look out into the cosmos, the further back we’re looking into the history of the Universe. 

This departure from the paradigm of empiricism unmitigated by idealism in the natural sciences is neither new nor without its merits. While Einstein held that no inductive methods “could lead to the fundamental concepts of physics” (418), many physicists such as Maxwell and philosophers like St. Mill and E. Mach were committed to the materialist explanatory direction and inductive inferences from experience given that the scientists’ concepts were consistent with the ‘reality’ of their experiences (414). The real turn towards constructive speculation on the nature of reality that is both voided from and grounded in the sensible experience of the observer, occurred when Faraday and Maxwell developed their electric field theory on the shoulders of Huyghen’s theory of a material ether to explain the undulatory nature of light (415). Although they were dealing with inobservable phenomenon, they drew on both deductive logical inferences and the world of experiences their senses could account for. 

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