The debate on the ontological status of spacetime in General Relativity has historically seen two principal philosophical contenders: substantivalism, roughly the view that holds that spacetime exists apart from the material contents of the universe, and relationism, the doctrine that spacetime does not exist, i.e., it is a mere abstract web of spatiotemporal relations among bodies. This dispute, however, has rarely been fought on a cosmological battlefield. In this paper an attempt in this direction is made. The question at issue (...) is the following: is there any feature of our universe that requires or is best explained in terms of a substantival space? I claim that there is indeed: the expansion of the universe, perhaps the most important phenomenon in cosmology, can play such a role. (shrink)

One of the few authors to have explicitly connected the physical issue of the expansion of the universe with the philosophical topic of the metaphysical status of space is Gerald James Whitrow. This paper examines his view and tries to highlight its strong and weak points, thereby clarifying its obscure aspects. In general, this really interesting philosophical approach to one of the most important phenomena concerning our universe, and therefore modern cosmology, has been very rarely tackled. This unicity increases the (...) value, from a physical, philosophical and historical point of view, of Whitrow’s attempt and calls for new research. (shrink)

In this paper I take a sceptical view of the standard cosmological model and its variants, mainly on the following grounds: (i) The method of mathematical modelling that characterises modern natural philosophy-as opposed to Aristotle's-goes well with the analytic, piecemeal approach to physical phenomena adopted by Galileo, Newton and their followers, but it is hardly suited for application to the whole world. (ii) Einstein's first cosmological model (1917) was not prompted by the intimations of experience but by a desire to (...) satisfy Mach's Principle. (iii) The standard cosmological model-a Friedmann-Lematre-Robertson-Walker spacetime expanding with or without end from an initial singularity-is supported by the phenomena of redshifted light from distant sources and very nearly isotropic thermal background radiation provided that two mutually inconsistent physical theories are jointly brought to bear on these phenomena, viz the quantum theory of elementary particles and Einstein's theory of gravity. (iv) While the former is certainly corroborated by high-energy experiments conducted under conditions allegedly similar to those prevailing in the early world, precise tests of the latter involve applications of the Schwarzschild solution or the PPN formalism for which there is no room in a Friedmann-Lematre-Robertson-Walker spacetime. (shrink)