Kant claims that we cannot cognize the mutual interaction of substances without their being in space; he also claims that we cannot cognize a ‘spatial community’ among substances without their being in mutual interaction. I situate these theses in their historical context and consider Kant’s reasons for accepting them. I argue that they rest on commitments regarding the metaphysical grounding of, first, the possibility of mutual interaction among substances-as-appearances and, second, the actuality of specific distance-relations among such substances. By illuminating (...) these commitments, I shed light on Kant’s metaphysics of space and its relation to Newton and Leibniz’s views. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that reading history of physics as a contribution to history of philosophy is important for contemporary philosophy of physics. My argument centers around a particular case: special relativity versus presentism. By means of resources drawn from reading aspects of Newton's work as contributions to philosophy, I argue that there is in physics an alternative way to approach what we mean by "present" such that presentism remains an open empirical question whose refutation requires resources that go (...) beyond those of special relativity. I offer this as an example of one fruitful way in which we pursue integrated HPS. (shrink)

Within philosophy of physics it is broadly accepted that presentism as an empirical hypothesis has been falsified by the development of special relativity. In this article, I identify and reject an assumption common to both presentists and advocates of the block universe and then offer an alternative version of presentism that does not begin from spatiotemporal structure, which is an empirical hypothesis, and which has yet to be falsified. While some features of familiar presentism are lost, a sufficient core remains (...) to warrant the label. (shrink)