Time, Conflict, and Human Values (review)

Abstract

Framing an interdisciplinary synthesis of the many scientific and literary studies of time cannot be an easy task, but achieving such a synthesis has captured the attention and energies of J.T. Fraser across a decades-long series of studies, set out in both monographs and edited volumes, and presented in his most recent publication, Time, Conflict, and Human Values (hereinafter referred to as Time.) With ascetic patience, he shows that he is at home in the literatures of time and change in such fields of inquiry as physics, biology, neurophysiology, psychology, drama, myth, and philosophy. He is a polymath in the best sense of the term, seeking consilience across fields of inquiry at those junctures where the processual features of reality are most tellingly revealed, but all the while developing joint enterprises with experts who analyze temporal dimensions in their own special fields. He has sifted through their otherwise discordant disciplinary voices to find a theoretically concordant classification of the main types and levels of temporality.