Abstract
It has been argued that Special relativity with its most striking feature, namely that the definition of the present depends on a choice of an inertial frame, actually refutes presentism – the metaphysical view that only present events are real. Contrariwise, it has also been argued that the notion of the present in a relativistic setting is not a matter-of-fact but established by convention and hence devoid of metaphysical interest. In this paper, I contend that, considering Einstein’s philosophical motivations for introducing special relativity, both of these assertions are wrong and that the pre-relativistic notion of the present may be retained.
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Notes
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This argument is due to Putnam (1967, p. 246) although he did not state it in terms of reality of points.
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Cohen, Y. (2016). Why Presentism Cannot Be Refuted by Special Relativity. In: Dolev, Y., Roubach, M. (eds) Cosmological and Psychological Time. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 285. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22590-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22590-6_3
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