Why presentism cannot be refuted by special relativity

Yehiel Cohen

pp. 41-51

in: Yuval Dolev, Michael Roubach (eds), Cosmological and psychological time, Berlin, Springer, 2016

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.