Results for 'Substantivalism about Spacetime'

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  1. Super-Relationism: Combining Eliminativism about Objects and Relationism about Spacetime.Baptiste Le Bihan - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (8):2151-2172.
    I will introduce and motivate eliminativist super-relationism. This is the conjunction of relationism about spacetime and eliminativism about material objects. According to the view, the universe is a big collection of spatio-temporal relations and natural properties, and no substance (material or spatio-temporal) exists in it. The view is original since eliminativism about material objects, when understood as including not only ordinary objects like tables or chairs but also physical particles, is generally taken to imply substantivalism (...)
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  2. How to Be a Spacetime Substantivalist.Trevor Teitel - 2022 - Journal of Philosophy 119 (5):233-278.
    The consensus among spacetime substantivalists is to respond to Leibniz's classic shift arguments, and their contemporary incarnation in the form of the hole argument, by pruning the allegedly problematic metaphysical possibilities that generate these arguments. Some substantivalists do so by directly appealing to a modal doctrine akin to anti-haecceitism. Other substantivalists do so by appealing to an underlying hyperintensional doctrine that implies some such modal doctrine. My first aim in this paper is to pose a challenge for all extant (...)
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  3. Holes in Spacetime: Some Neglected Essentials.Trevor Teitel - 2019 - Journal of Philosophy 116 (7):353-389.
    The hole argument purports to show that all spacetime theories of a certain form are indeterministic, including the General Theory of Relativity. The argument has given rise to an industry of searching for a metaphysics of spacetime that delivers the right modal implications to rescue determinism. In this paper, I first argue that certain prominent extant replies to the hole argument—namely, those that appeal to an essentialist doctrine about spacetime—fail to deliver the requisite modal implications. As (...)
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  4. Counterparts, Determinism, and the Hole Argument.Franciszek Cudek - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    The hole argument concludes that substantivalism about spacetime entails the radical indeterminism of the general theory of relativity (GR). In this paper, I amend and defend a response to the hole argument first proposed by Butterfield (1989) that relies on the idea of counterpart substantivalism. My amendment clarifies and develops the metaphysical presuppositions of counterpart substantivalism and its relation to various definitions of determinism. My defence consists of two claims. First, contra Weatherall (2018) and others: (...)
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  5. Thinking about Spacetime.David Yates - 2021 - In Christian Wüthrich, Baptiste Le Bihan & Nick Huggett (eds.), Philosophy Beyond Spacetime. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Several different quantum gravity research programmes suggest, for various reasons, that spacetime is not part of the fundamental ontology of physics. This gives rise to the problem of empirical coherence: if fundamental physical entities do not occupy spacetime or instantiate spatiotemporal properties, how can fundamental theories concerning those entities be justified by observation of spatiotemporally located things like meters, pointers and dials? I frame the problem of empirical coherence in terms of entailment: how could a non-spatiotemporal fundamental theory (...)
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  6. How Physics and Metaphysics Interact in Spacetime.Alireza Mansouri - 2015 - Persian Journal on Metaphysics 6 (18):61-76.
    This paper examines how science and metaphysics interact in our theories about space and time. It is argued that scientific development affects philosophical thoughts about space and time. We first review the traditional arguments of substantivalists and relationists about space and time, especially those contained in the correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke. Then we show the mutual influence of science and metaphysics in the modern scientific era: for example, in neo-Newtonian structure, field theory, and special and general (...)
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  7. On the Ontology of Spacetime: Substantivalism, Relationism, Eternalism, and Emergence.Gustavo E. Romero - 2017 - Foundations of Science 22 (1):141-159.
    I present a discussion of some issues in the ontology of spacetime. After a characterisation of the controversies among relationists, substantivalists, eternalists, and presentists, I offer a new argument for rejecting presentism, the doctrine that only present objects exist. Then, I outline and defend a form of spacetime realism that I call event substantivalism. I propose an ontological theory for the emergence of spacetime from more basic entities. Finally, I argue that a relational theory of pre-geometric (...)
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  8. Spacetime, Ontology, and Structural Realism.Edward Slowik - 2005 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 19 (2):147 – 166.
    This essay explores the possibility of constructing a structural realist interpretation of spacetime theories that can resolve the ontological debate between substantivalists and relationists. Drawing on various structuralist approaches in the philosophy of mathematics, as well as on the theoretical complexities of general relativity, our investigation will reveal that a structuralist approach can be beneficial to the spacetime theorist as a means of deflating some of the ontological disputes regarding similarly structured spacetimes.
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  9. On Spacetime Functionalism.David John Baker - manuscript
    Eleanor Knox has argued that our concept of spacetime applies to whichever structure plays a certain functional role in the laws (the role of determining local inertial structure). I raise two complications for this approach. First, our spacetime concept seems to have the structure of a cluster concept, which means that Knox's inertial criteria for spacetime cannot succeed with complete generality. Second, the notion of metaphysical fundamentality may feature in the spacetime concept, in which case (...) functionalism may be uninformative in the absence of answers to fundamental metaphysical questions like the substantivalist/relationist debate. (shrink)
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  10. The Relationist and Substantivalist Theories of Time: Foes or Friends?Jiri Benovsky - 2010 - European Journal of Philosophy 19 (4):491-506.
    Abstract: There are two traditionally rival views about the nature of time: substantivalism that takes time to be a substance that exists independently of events located in it, and relationism that takes time to be constructed out of events. In this paper, first, I want to make some progress with respect to the debate between these two views, and I do this mainly by examining the strategies they use to face the possibilities of ‘empty time’ and ‘time without (...)
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  11. Spacetime structural property of matter in movement.Alfonso Leon Guillen Gomez - 2010 - In Petrov`s Symposium Contributed papers. Kazan, Federation Russa: Kazan Federal University. pp. 101-109.
    The theoretical contradiction between General Relativity and Quantum Gravity about gravity was ended, since spacetime is not structural property of the gravitational fi eld like Einstein said. Exactly spacetime is the structural geometric property of the matter and energy that it gives their geometric dimensions. Thus, spacetime is not continent of the matter (Substantialism), since it is contained. Neither is the category of the relations between material bodies or between their events (Relationalism) since is not relational (...)
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  12. Productive Laws in Relativistic Spacetimes.Chris Dorst - forthcoming - Philosophers' Imprint.
    One of the most intuitive views about the metaphysics of laws of nature is Tim Maudlin's idea of a Fundamental Law of Temporal Evolution. So-called FLOTEs are primitive elements of the universe that produce later states from earlier states. While FLOTEs are at home in traditional Newtonian and non-relativistic quantum mechanical theories (not to mention our pre-theoretic conception of the world), I consider here whether they can be made to work with relativity. In particular, shifting to relativistic spacetimes poses (...)
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  13. Closing the Hole Argument.Hans Halvorson & John Byron Manchak - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    The hole argument purportedly shows that spacetime substantivalism implies a pernicious form of indeterminism. We show that the argument is seductive only because it mistakes a trivial claim (viz. there are isomorphic models) for a significant claim (viz. there are hole isomorphisms). We prove that the latter claim is false -- thereby closing the debate about whether substantivalism implies indeterminism.
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  14. Group Field Theories: Decoupling Spacetime Emergence from the Ontology of non-Spatiotemporal Entities.Marco Forgione - 2024 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 14 (22):1-23.
    With the present paper I maintain that the group field theory (GFT) approach to quantum gravity can help us clarify and distinguish the problems of spacetime emergence from the questions about the nature of the quanta of space. I will show that the mechanism of phase transition suggests a form of indifference between scales (or phases) and that such an indifference allows us to black-box questions about the nature of the ontology of the fundamental levels of the (...)
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  15. Contingencies within Spacetime.Baptiste Le Bihan - 2015 - Dissertation, University of Rennes 1
    I begin by giving reasons to accept the block-universe view, the strongly supported by physics view that we live in a four-dimensional world. According to it, the past and the future are as real as the present. As a result, it seems that the future is determined in the sense that what will be the case will necessarily be the case. In the dissertation, I examine whether we have to accept this consequence. I show that we do not have to (...)
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  16. On Structuralism’s Multiple Paths through Spacetime Theories.Edward Slowik - 2012 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 2 (1):45-66.
    This essay examines the underdetermination problem that plagues structuralist approaches to spacetime theories, with special emphasis placed on the epistemic brands of structuralism, whether of the scientific realist variety or not. Recent non-realist structuralist accounts, by Friedman and van Fraassen, have touted the fact that different structures can accommodate the same evidence as a virtue vis-à-vis their realist counterparts; but, as will be argued, these claims gain little traction against a properly constructed liberal version of epistemic structural realism. Overall, (...)
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  17.  54
    About time, concisely. [REVIEW]Matias Slavov - forthcoming - Metascience.
    Adrian Bardon has produced a new version of his historical introduction to the philosophy of time. Originally published in 2013, the second edition of 2024 is partly rewritten and supplemented with a more extensive discussion on our disposition to project the passage of time [...] Although the book’s title emphasizes history, most of the chapters are directed at issues in systematic philosophy of time: the realism/antirealism debate, temporal passage, temporal experience, spacetime, direction, time travel, time and free will, and (...)
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  18. Is gravity, the curvature of spacetime or a quantum phenomenon.Alfonso Leon Guillen Gomez - 2014 - Journal of Advances in Physics 4 (1):194-203.
    Gravity is the curvature of spacetime, the structural property of static gravitational field, a geometric field, in curved coordinates, according the functions guv, that express geometric relations between material events. Course, general relativity is a relational theory, however, gravity, a thinking category, has symetric physical effects with matter. We use, analitic and critic method of reread the general relativity, since the perspective of the history of the science and the philosophy of the science. Our goal is driver the debate (...)
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  19. What is spacetime?Alfonso León Guillén Gómez - manuscript
    Based on the Russian school of Logunov and others, with the contribution of Tom van Flandern, and his previous works on space-time, gravitational waves and speed of the gravity, the author discusses the theory of the time-space fluid that results from the supposed gravitational waves that would have detected LIGO, and reaffirms the space-time as a structural geometric property of the dynamic matter (radiation, matter and quantum vacuum), now with the strong argument that without escape, in an unnatural way, the (...)
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  20. On curved spacetime.Sydney Ernest Grimm - manuscript
    Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity was once the leading theory in theoretical physics. Unfortunately the theory describes macroscopic reality without a clear link with the the microcosm in respect to the properties of spacetime. However the theory of General Relativity has proved to predict macroscopic phenomena in a very accurate way. Nowadays most theoretical physicists use the conceptual framework of quantum theory. So it is not surprisingly that the question about the “true nature” of spacetime becomes (...)
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  21. Imagination, Fiction and the Reality of Minkowski’s Discovery of Spacetime.Gregorie Dupuis - 2023 - In Gregorie Dupuis & A. S. Stefanov (eds.), Spacetime Conference 2022. Selected peer-reviewed papers presented at the Sixth International Conference on the Nature and Ontology of Spacetime, 12 - 15 September 2022, Albena, Bulgaria. Montreal: Minkowski Institute Press.
    One of the greatest achievements of modern physics is the discovery of spacetime by Hermann Minkowski. Still, talking about the ”discovery” of spacetime cannot be done without further questioning its ontological status. Did Minkowski discover a real physical substrate? What is the creative role of his scientific imagination in the process of discovery? To what extent the explanatory power of spacetime supports the conclusion that it is a true description of the physical world? I consider those (...)
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  22. A Historical Defence of Non-Spacetime Hypotheses: Non-Local Beables and Leibnizian Ubeity.Edward Slowik - 2016 - Philosophia Scientiae 20:149-166.
    Do theories of quantum mechanics and quantum gravity require spacetime to be a basic, ground level feature, or can spacetime be seen as an emergent element of these theories? While several commentators have raised serious doubts about the prospects of forgoing the standard spacetime backdrop, it will be argued that a defense of these emergent spacetime interpretations of quantum mechanics and quantum gravity hypotheses can be made, whether as an inference to the best explanation or (...)
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  23. A puzzle about rates of change.David Builes & Trevor Teitel - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (10):3155-3169.
    Most of our best scientific descriptions of the world employ rates of change of some continuous quantity with respect to some other continuous quantity. For instance, in classical physics we arrive at a particle’s velocity by taking the time-derivative of its position, and we arrive at a particle’s acceleration by taking the time-derivative of its velocity. Because rates of change are defined in terms of other continuous quantities, most think that facts about some rate of change obtain in virtue (...)
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  24. Space, Time, and (how they) Matter: a Discussion about some Metaphysical Insights Provided by our Best Fundamental Physical Theories.Valia Allori - 2016 - In G. C. Ghirardi & J. Statchel (eds.), Space, Time, and Frontiers of Human Understanding. Springer. pp. 95-107.
    This paper is a brief (and hopelessly incomplete) non-standard introduction to the philosophy of space and time. It is an introduction because I plan to give an overview of what I consider some of the main questions about space and time: Is space a substance over and above matter? How many dimensions does it have? Is space-time fundamental or emergent? Does time have a direction? Does time even exist? Nonetheless, this introduction is not standard because I conclude the discussion (...)
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  25. Why a Gunk World is Compatible with Nihilism about Objects.Baptiste Le Bihan - 2013 - Studia Philosophica Estonica 6 (1):1-14.
    Ted Sider argues that nihilism about objects is incompatible with the metaphysical possibility of gunk and takes this point to show that nihilism is flawed. I shall describe one kind of nihilism able to answer this objection. I believe that most of the things we usually encounter do not exist. That is, I take talk of macroscopic objects and macroscopic properties to refer to sets of fundamental properties, which are invoked as a matter of linguistic convention. This view is (...)
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  26. A Curiosity about Newtonian Gravity v. 2.0.Paul Merriam - manuscript
    We give a very curious curiosity about Newtonian Gravity.
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  27. A Curiosity about Newtonian Gravity.Paul Merriam - manuscript
    We give a very curious curiosity about Newtonian gravity.
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  28. Interpreting Quantum Mechanics and Predictability in Terms of Facts About the Universe.Andrew Knight - manuscript
    A potentially new interpretation of quantum mechanics posits the state of the universe as a consistent set of facts that are instantiated in the correlations among entangled objects. A fact (or event) occurs exactly when the number or density of future possibilities decreases, and a quantum superposition exists if and only if the facts of the universe are consistent with the superposition. The interpretation sheds light on both in-principle and real-world predictability of the universe.
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  29. Relational and Substantival Ontologies, and the Nature and the Role of Primitives in Ontological Theories.Jiri Benovsky - 2010 - Erkenntnis 73 (1):101-121.
    Several metaphysical debates have typically been modeled as oppositions between a relationist approach and a substantivalist approach. Such debates include the Bundle Theory and the Substratum Theory about ordinary material objects, the Bundle (Humean) Theory and the Substance (Cartesian) Theory of the Self, and Relationism and Substantivalism about time. In all three debates, the substantivalist side typically insists that in order to provide a good treatment of the subject-matter of the theory (time, Self, material objects), it is (...)
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  30. Malebranche on Space, Time, and Divine Simplicity.Torrance Fung - 2023 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 94 (3):257-280.
    Not much attention has been paid to Malebranche’s philosophy of time. Scholars who have written on it have typically written about it only in passing, and by and large discuss it only in relation to his philosophy of religion. This is appropriate insofar as Malebranche doesn’t discuss his views of time in isolation from his religious metaphysics. I argue that Malebranche’s conception of how created beings have their properties commits him to saying that God is omnitemporal rather than atemporal. (...)
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  31. Relative Locations.Andrew Bacon - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics (1):44-94.
    The fact that physical laws often admit certain kinds of space-time symmetries is often thought to be problematic for substantivalism --- the view that space-time is as real as the objects it contains. The most prominent alternative, relationism, avoids these problems but at the cost of giving abstract objects (rather than space-time points) a pivotal role in the fundamental metaphysics. This incurs related problems concerning the relation of the physical to the mathematical. In this paper I will present a (...)
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  32. Space Emergence in Contemporary Physics: Why We Do Not Need Fundamentality, Layers of Reality and Emergence.Baptiste Le Bihan - 2018 - Disputatio 10 (49):71-95.
    ‘Space does not exist fundamentally: it emerges from a more fundamental non-spatial structure.’ This intriguing claim appears in various research programs in contemporary physics. Philosophers of physics tend to believe that this claim entails either that spacetime does not exist, or that it is derivatively real. In this article, I introduce and defend a third metaphysical interpretation of the claim: reductionism about space. I argue that, as a result, there is no need to subscribe to fundamentality, layers of (...)
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  33. The ‘Space’ at the Intersection of Platonism and Nominalism.Edward Slowik - 2015 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 46 (2):393-408.
    This essay explores the use of platonist and nominalist concepts, derived from the philosophy of mathematics and metaphysics, as a means of elucidating the debate on spacetime ontology and the spatial structures endorsed by scientific realists. Although the disputes associated with platonism and nominalism often mirror the complexities involved with substantivalism and relationism, it will be argued that a more refined three-part distinction among platonist/nominalist categories can nonetheless provide unique insights into the core assumptions that underlie spatial ontologies, (...)
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  34. Kaila's interpretation of Einstein-Minkowski invariance theory.Matias Slavov - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 93 (3):57-65.
    This essay explores Kaila's interpretation of the special theory of relativity. Although the relevance of his work to logical empiricism is well-known, not much has been written on what Kaila calls the ‘Einstein-Minkowski invariance theory’. Kaila's interpretation focuses on two salient features. First, he emphasizes the importance of the invariance of the spacetime interval. The general point about spacetime invariance has been known at least since Minkowski, yet Kaila applies his overall tripartite theory of invariances to space, (...)
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  35. Relativity and Three Four‐dimensionalisms.Cody Gilmore, Damiano Costa & Claudio Calosi - 2016 - Philosophy Compass 11 (2):102-120.
    Relativity theory is often said to support something called ‘the four-dimensional view of reality’. But there are at least three different views that sometimes go by this name. One is ‘spacetime unitism’, according to which there is a spacetime manifold, and if there are such things as points of space or instants of time, these are just spacetime regions of different sorts: thus space and time are not separate manifolds. A second is the B-theory of time, according (...)
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  36. Philosophy of Space‐Time Physics.Craig Callender & Carl Hoefer - 2002 - In Peter Machamer & Michael Silberstein (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. pp. 173–198.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Relationism, Substantivalism and Space‐time Conventionalism about Space‐time Black Holes and Singularities Horizons and Uniformity Conclusion.
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  37. From Quantum Entanglement to Spatiotemporal Distance.Alyssa Ney - 2021 - In Christian Wüthrich, Baptiste Le Bihan & Nick Huggett (eds.), Philosophy Beyond Spacetime. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Within the field of quantum gravity, there is an influential research program developing the connection between quantum entanglement and spatiotemporal distance. Quantum information theory gives us highly refined tools for quantifying quantum entanglement such as the entanglement entropy. Through a series of well-confirmed results, it has been shown how these facts about the entanglement entropy of component systems may be connected to facts about spatiotemporal distance. Physicists are seeing these results as yielding promising methods for better understanding the (...)
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  38. Spatially-Rotated Paintings: A Reply to Markosian’s "Sideways Music".Shen-yi Liao - manuscript
    In “Sideways Music”, Ned Markosian uses aesthetic intuitions about temporally-rotated music to argue that the metaphysics of time is different from the metaphysics of space. In response, I use aesthetic intuitions about spatially-rotated paintings to pose a dilemma for Markosian’s argument: either he accepts the intuitions about spatially-rotated paintings, in which case he must give up on some assumptions in his argument, or he rejects intuitions about spatially-rotated paintings, in which case an analogous response can be (...)
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  39. Background Independence: Lessons for Further Decades of Dispute.Trevor Teitel - 2019 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 65:41-54.
    Background independence begins life as an informal property that a physical theory might have, often glossed as 'doesn't posit a fixed spacetime background'. Interest in trying to offer a precise account of background independence has been sparked by the pronouncements of several theorists working on quantum gravity that background independence embodies in some sense an essential discovery of the General Theory of Relativity, and a feature we should strive to carry forward to future physical theories. This paper has two (...)
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  40. Physics and Philosophy of Physics in the Work of Mario Bunge.Gustavo E. Romero - 2019 - In Mario Augusto Bunge, Michael R. Matthews, Guillermo M. Denegri, Eduardo L. Ortiz, Heinz W. Droste, Alberto Cordero, Pierre Deleporte, María Manzano, Manuel Crescencio Moreno, Dominique Raynaud, Íñigo Ongay de Felipe, Nicholas Rescher, Richard T. W. Arthur, Rögnvaldur D. Ingthorsson, Evandro Agazzi, Ingvar Johansson, Joseph Agassi, Nimrod Bar-Am, Alberto Cupani, Gustavo E. Romero, Andrés Rivadulla, Art Hobson, Olival Freire Junior, Peter Slezak, Ignacio Morgado-Bernal, Marta Crivos, Leonardo Ivarola, Andreas Pickel, Russell Blackford, Michael Kary, A. Z. Obiedat, Carolina I. García Curilaf, Rafael González del Solar, Luis Marone, Javier Lopez de Casenave, Francisco Yannarella, Mauro A. E. Chaparro, José Geiser Villavicencio- Pulido, Martín Orensanz, Jean-Pierre Marquis, Reinhard Kahle, Ibrahim A. Halloun, José María Gil, Omar Ahmad, Byron Kaldis, Marc Silberstein, Carolina I. García Curilaf, Rafael González del Solar, Javier Lopez de Casenave, Íñigo Ongay de Felipe & Villavicencio-Pulid (eds.), Mario Bunge: A Centenary Festschrift. Springer Verlag. pp. 289-301.
    This brief review of Mario Bunge’s research on physics begins with an analysis of his masterpiece Foundations of Physics, and then it discusses his other contributions to the philosophy of physics. Following that is a summary of his more recent reactions to scientific discoveries in physics and a discussion of his position about non-locality in quantum mechanics, as well as his changing opinions on the nature of spacetime. The paper ends with a brief assessment of Bunge’s legacy concerning (...)
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  41. Space, time and parsimony.Daniel Nolan - 2022 - Noûs 57 (4):763-783.
    This paper argues that all of the standard theories about the divisions of space and time can benefit from, and may need to rely on, parsimony considerations. More specifically, whether spacetime is discrete, gunky or pointy, there are wildly unparsimonious rivals to standard accounts that need to be resisted by proponents of those accounts, and only parsimony considerations offer a natural way of doing that resisting. Furthermore, quantitative parsimony considerations appear to be needed in many of these cases.
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  42. Identity, space-time, and cosmology.Jan Faye - 2008 - In Dennis Geert Bernardus Johan Dieks (ed.), The Ontology of Spacetime II. Elsevier. pp. 39-57.
    Modern cosmology treats space and time, or rather space-time, as concrete particulars. The General Theory of Relativity combines the distribution of matter and energy with the curvature of space-time. Here space-time appears as a concrete entity which affects matter and energy and is affected by the things in it. I question the idea that space-time is a concrete existing entity which both substantivalism and reductive relationism maintain. Instead I propose an alternative view, which may be called non-reductive relationism, by (...)
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  43. Are we free to make the laws?Christian Loew & Andreas Hüttemann - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-16.
    Humeans about laws maintain that laws of nature are nothing over and above the complete distribution of non-modal, categorical properties in spacetime. ‘Humean compatibilists’ argue that if Humeanism about laws is true, then agents in a deterministic world can do otherwise than they are lawfully determined to do because of the distinctive nature of Humean laws. More specifically, they reject a central premise of the Consequence argument by maintaining that deterministic laws of nature are ‘up to us’. (...)
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  44. The Hole Argument.Oliver Pooley - 2021 - In Eleanor Knox & Alastair Wilson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Physics. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 145-158.
    This paper reviews the hole argument as an argument against spacetime substantivalism. After a careful presentation of the argument itself, I critically review possible responses.
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  45. Countable fusion not yet proven guilty: it may be the Whiteheadian account of space whatdunnit.G. Oppy - 1997 - Analysis 57 (4):249-253.
    I criticise a paper by Peter Forrest in which he argues that a principle of unrestricted countable fusion has paradoxical consequences. I argue that the paradoxical consequences that he exhibits may be due to his Whiteheadean assumptions about the nature of spacetime rather than to the principle of unrestricted countable fusion.
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  46. What Theoretical Equivalence Could Not Be.Trevor Teitel - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):4119-4149.
    Formal criteria of theoretical equivalence are mathematical mappings between specific sorts of mathematical objects, notably including those objects used in mathematical physics. Proponents of formal criteria claim that results involving these criteria have implications that extend beyond pure mathematics. For instance, they claim that formal criteria bear on the project of using our best mathematical physics as a guide to what the world is like, and also have deflationary implications for various debates in the metaphysics of physics. In this paper, (...)
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  47. In light of the theory of Special Relativity is a Passage of Time and the argument of the Presentist untenable?Mekhi Dhesi - 2016 - Dissertation, University College London
    In light of the Special Theory of Relativity and the Minkowski creation of ‘spacetime’, the universe is taken to be a four-dimensional entity which postulates bodies as existing within a temporally extended reality. The Special Theory of Relativity’s implications liken the nature of the universe to a ‘block’ within which all events coexist equally in spacetime. Such a view strikes against the very essence of presentism, which holds that all that exists is the instantaneous state of objects in (...)
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  48. Fundamental and Emergent Geometry in Newtonian Physics.David Wallace - 2020 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (1):1-32.
    Using as a starting point recent and apparently incompatible conclusions by Saunders and Knox, I revisit the question of the correct spacetime setting for Newtonian physics. I argue that understood correctly, these two versions of Newtonian physics make the same claims both about the background geometry required to define the theory, and about the inertial structure of the theory. In doing so I illustrate and explore in detail the view—espoused by Knox, and also by Brown —that inertial (...)
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  49. Humean Laws and (Nested) Counterfactuals.Christian Loew & Siegfried Jaag - 2019 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (278):93-113.
    Humean reductionism about laws of nature is the view that the laws reduce to the total distribution of non-modal or categorical properties in spacetime. A worry about Humean reductionism is that it cannot motivate the characteristic modal resilience of laws under counterfactual suppositions and that it thus generates wrong verdicts about certain nested counterfactuals. In this paper, we defend Humean reductionism by motivating an account of the modal resilience of Humean laws that gets nested counterfactuals right.
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  50. ARE DARK MATTER AND DARK ENERGY OPPOSITE EFFECTS OF THE QUANTUM VACUUM? Guillen - manuscript
    In the standard model of cosmology, λCDM, were introduced to explain the anomalies of the orbital velocities of galaxies in clusters highest according estimated by General Relativity the dark matter and the accelerated expansion of the universe the dark energy. The model λCDM is based in the equations of the General Relativity that of the total mass-energy of the universe assigns 4.9% to matter (including only baryonic matter), 26.8%, to dark matter and 68.3% to dark energy adjusted according observed in (...)
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