Randy Dible

This chapter explores foundational issues in the philosophy of time and space by comparing the phenomenological contributions of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and Peter Byrne Manchester. Each of these two philosophers have revived an ancient paradigm for thinking about problems of continuity in the philosophy of space and time. Peter Byrne Manchester’s 2005 book, The Syntax of Time: The Phenomenology of Time in Greek Physics and Speculative Logic from Iamblichus to Anaximander—the second in the Brill series Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition—traces Husserl’s phenomenology of inner time-consciousness back through Plotinus to Aristotle’s philosophy of time, and thereby reconnects its problematic to the most archaic origins of philosophy in the Presocratics. Through the philosophical reconstruction of an ancient worldview on the basis of an insight about the ordering principle of time as a logical syntax, Peter Manchester uncovers a neglected ancient doctrine called spherics (sphairikē, or sphairikon logon), which has deep implications not only for time but for all the dimensions of experience. He names his guiding figure the Sphere of the All, a formulation belonging to his ancient sources. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life also recognizes a previously unnoticed syntax. For her, it is the intrinsic functioning of life, which she elaborates in her phenomenology of life as ontopoietic process. Her extensive account of life’s inner-workings yields a phenomenological cosmology of multiple spheres of being grounded in a “great vision of the All” (Tymieniecka 2000, 643), much like Manchester’s spherics. The convergence to similar frameworks arrived at independently by these two philosophers is a philosophical synchronicity due to the teleology at play in their phenomenological thought, common to multiple philosophical cosmologies, but what is more remarkable is the convergence of their specific functional systems and metrological terms. This convergence arises from the pursuit of an ancient and perennial cosmology rooted in a deep synthesis of order and measure. The ancient intuition that the language of God is the language of mathematics plays a special role in classical phenomenology, and the recovery of the doctrine of the spheres represents a new contribution to the synthetic and geometrical side of this intuition. By arriving at a synthesis of the most fundamental ontological units in these two systems, a new paradigm of speculative cosmology and transcendental logic emerges from the paradigm of the sphere.