The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time

About this book

In this extraordinary work Donald J. Wilcox seeks to discover an approach to narrative and history consistent with the discontinuous relative time of the twentieth century. He shows how our B.C./A.D. system intimately connected to Newtonian concepts of continuous objective and absolute time has affected our conception and experience of the past. He demonstrates absolute times centrality to modern historical methodologies and the problems it has created in the selection and interpretation of facts. Inspired by contemporary fiction and Einsteinian concepts of relativity he concludes his analysis with a comparison of our system with earlier pre-Newtonian time schemes to create a radical new critique of historical objectivity.