With the advent and growth of electronic communication, the word "cyberspace" has entered into everyday parlance. But what does this word signify? I begin by sketching an equivalence between physical space and cyberspace, showing that they share the concepts of place, distance, size and route in common. With this mutual framework in place, I go on to examine various theories—substantival, relational, Einsteinian and Kantian—concerning the nature of physical space. We see that, while cyberspace shares some of the properties of physical (...) space isolated by each of these theories, still it cannot be subsumed under any one theory. We also see that cyberspace exhibits several novel properties, projecting it far beyond the scope of any existing theory and setting it apart as an exciting new spatial medium. (shrink)

Many modern commentators on inertial phenomena hold (or just assume) that there is no "problem of inertia", on the grounds that either (a) no explanation is needed for such phenomena or (b) the explanation is already at hand. My purpose here is to comment on both views, defending the thesis that the problem is real and still unsolved.

Many are committed to the idea that the present generation has obligations to future generations, for example, obligations to preserve the environment and certain natural resources for those generations. However, some philosophers want to explain why we have these obligations in terms of correlative rights that future persons have against persons in the present. Attributing such rights to future persons is controversial, for there seem to be compelling arguments against the position. According to the “nonexistence” argument, future persons cannot have (...) rights (and so should not be attributed rights) because they do not exist. According to the “no-satisfaction” argument, future persons cannot have a right to resources that do not exist at the time of their existence because such a right could not, in principle, be satisfied. In this paper, I will argue that an eternalist ontology of time provides the resources for satisfactorily responding to both the nonexistence and the no-satisfaction arguments. (shrink)

The open future view is the common-sense view that there is an ontological difference between the past, the present, and the future in the sense that the past and the present are real, whereas the future is not yet a part of reality. In this paper we develop a theory in which the open future view is consistently combined with special relativity. Technically, the heart of our contribution is a logical conservativity result showing that, although the open future view is (...) not definable inside the causal geometry of Minkowski space-time, it can be conservatively added to it. (shrink)