Julius Thomas Fraser

Julius Thomas Fraser (May 7, 1923 – November 20, 2010) was a Hungarian-born American author who made important scholarly contributions to the interdisciplinary Study of Time and was a founding member of the International Society for the Study of Time (ISST). He was the editor of the seminal volume Voices of Time - A Cooperative Survey of Man's Views of Time as Expressed by the Sciences and by the Humanities and founding editor of KronoScope Journal in 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 was a seminal figure in the general interdisciplinary study of temporality. His work has influenced the work of poet Frederick Turner and author David Mitchell.

Biography Born and raised in Hungary, Fraser 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 registered 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.

Fraser authored and edited many papers over the next several decades, but following the success of his 1966 edited volume of interdisciplinary articles, The Voices of Time, which remains a regularly cited classic of time studies, he oversaw editing and publication of the first ten volumes of "The Study of Time" series through the International Society for the Study of Time. Subsequent contributions include his role as a founding editor of the interdisciplinary Journal KronoScope. 1966, The Voices of Time: A Cooperative Survey of Man's Views of Time as Expressed by the Sciences and by the Humanities 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