The Unity of Time and Space

The topological structure of time has long beguiled and perplexed philosophers and sientists. This is nowhere more evident than in the metaphysics of Leibniz, whose writings brim with speculations about infinite temporal regressions, the unity of time, and the relation between time and causation. Even so, this facet of his thought has been almost entirely neglected by commentators, a neglect that has been to the detriment of both Leibniz scholarship and philosophy of time more generally. In this and the next two chapters I aim to redress this deficiency by providing a systematic examination of Leibniz’s views on the structure of time.

My principal concern over the next three chapters will be to provide an analysis of Leibniz’s views on the topology of time, but I will also attend to his views on the topology of space. Indeed, Leibniz’s views on the unity of time can hardly be extricated from his views on the unity of space; to address one is, in many instances, to address the other. This chapter argues that, as in the case of time, space is of necessity unified, and that the necessity of the unity of space is entailed by the same principles as the necessity of the unity of time. Both space and time are, therefore, unified of necessity. As in the case of time, I will wait until Chapter 4 to examine the unboundedness of space.