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(2016) Cosmological and psychological time, Dordrecht, Springer.
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.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-22590-6_3
Full citation:
Cohen, Y. (2016)., Why presentism cannot be refuted by special relativity, in Y. Dolev & M. Roubach (eds.), Cosmological and psychological time, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 41-51.
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