Philo

Volume 11, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2008

Franklin Mason
Pages 19-49

Presentism and the Special Theory

Presentism—the thesis that only those things that are present exist—seems to face an insurmountable barrier in the Special Theory of Relativity (STR). For the STR entails that simultaneity, and so the present, are relative to inertial frame. But if the present is the real and the present is relative, so too is in the real relative. But this cannot be. The real is absolute. But what is the Presentist to do? I suggest that she craft an alternative to the STR that is empirically equivalent to it but makes rooms for a present, and a real, that are absolute.