Julius Thomas Fraser
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Western 20th-century |
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|---|---|
| Name: | Julius Thomas Fraser |
| Birth: | May 7, 1923 |
| School/tradition: | Interdisciplinary |
| Main interests: | Time, Temporality |
| Influences: | Plato, Augustine, Shakespeare |
| Influenced: | Rovelli, |
J. T. Fraser (born: May 7th, 1923 in Budapest, Hungary) has made important scholarly contributions to the interdisciplinary Study of Time and was a founding member of the International Society for the Study of Time. His work has strongly influenced thinking about the nature of time across the disciplines from physics to sociology, biology to comparative religion, and he is a seminal figure in the general interdisciplinary study of temporality.
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[edit] Biography
Born and raised in Hungary, he was not drafted into the military on account of his partial Jewish heritage. Following the Second World War, he emigrated to the United States. Working as an engineer and an inventor for several years, he registering at least seven US patents between 1958 and 1963. However, he already began to think about the nature of time much earlier, as early as 1945. His early training had been in physics, but he completed his Ph.D. in 1969 in the Fakultät für Geistes- und Staatswissenschaften (Faculty of Social and Political Sciences) at the University of Hannover, and his dissertation was entitled: Time as a Hierarchy of Creative Conflicts. Although this work provided a template for many of his later investigations, he had already touched on many of the core ideas in his first articles in 1966, the same year that he founded the International Society for the Study of Time.
The number of articles and books Fraser authored and edited over the next several decades is too long list, but following the success of his well-received edited volume of interdiscplinary articles, The Voices of Time, in 1966, which remains a regularly cited classic of time studies to this day, he was instrumental in overseeing the editing and publication of the first ten volumes of the The Study of Time series through the ISST. More recent contributions include his role as a founding editor of the interdisciplinary Journal Kronoscope.
[edit] Central Themes and Ideas in his Writings
Throughout his many works, two themes stand out centrally:
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- The Hierarchical Theory of Time
- The Theory of Time as Conflict
In fact, much of his work can be understood as an interplay between these themes, whether played out in disciplinary theatres of the sciences, the arts, the humanities, and history, or as a bridging principle between fields of enquiry themselves. Arguably, the very distinction between disciplines as diverse as those which epistemically belong in the natural and human spheres of knowledge find their methodological and definitional norms informed by especially his hierarchical theory of time.
[edit] The Study of Time: Methodology
[edit] The Unity of Time Hypothesis
[edit] Interdisciplinarity and Time
[edit] The Hierarchical Theory of Time
[edit] The Theory of Time as Conflict
[edit] References
Books that he has authored include:
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- 1975, Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge
- 1978, Time as Conflict: a Scientific and Humanistic Study
- 1982, The Genesis and Evolution of Time: a Critique of Interpretations in Physics
- 1987, Time the Familiar Stranger
- 1999, Time, Conflict, and Human Values
- 2007, Time and Time Again: Reports from a Boundary of the Universe (forthcoming)
