Journal article
Getting tense about relativity
- Abstract:
- Special relativity has been understood by many as vindicating a tenseless conception of time, denying the existence of tensed facts and a fortiori objective temporal passage. The reason for this is straightforward: both passage and the obtaining of tensed facts require a universal knife-edge present moment—yet this structure is not easily reconcilable with the relativity of simultaneity. The above being said, the prospects for tense and passage are sometimes claimed to be improved on moving to cosmological solutions of general relativity. In this paper, we evaluate in detail these arguments, finding that there remain several open questions to be addressed if the introduction of tensed facts into the relativistic context is to be compelling. Moreover, we argue that, even setting aside these issues, objective tense stands and falls in relativity for exactly the same reasons that it does in classical philosophical discussions on the matter.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 424.1KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s11229-020-02560-z
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Verlag
- Journal:
- Synthese More from this journal
- Volume:
- 198
- Pages:
- 8103-8125
- Publication date:
- 2020-02-04
- Acceptance date:
- 2020-01-24
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1573-0964
- ISSN:
-
0039-7857
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1083512
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1083512
- Deposit date:
-
2020-01-28
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Read et Quresh-Hurst
- Copyright date:
- 2020
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2020. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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