ABSTRACT
Eternalism, roughly, is the view that our most inclusive quantifiers range over
past, present and future entities; its opposite is presentism, the view that our
most inclusive quantifiers range only over present entities. Many have argued
against presentism on the grounds that presentism is incompatible with the
theory of relativity.1 Relativity, goes the argument, is a paradigmatically
successful scientific theory; presentism contravenes it; so much the worse for
presentism. I shall urge in what follows that this line of reasoning is incon-
clusive at best. I grant that orthodox relativity theory favors an ontology of eternalism. But I shall draw on some recent work by Julian Barbour and
collaborators to argue that there are presentist-friendly variations on
orthodox relativity theory on all fours with the orthodox approach in terms
of empirical adequacy and theoretical virtue. Current physics, I shall urge,
gives us no good reason to prefer orthodoxy to these unorthodox variations.
The upshot, I shall suggest, is that the incompatibility of presentism and
orthodox relativity theory implies nothing very interesting about how to
resolve the presentism/eternalism debate. I begin by stating more precisely what I shall mean by ‘‘eternalism’’ and
‘‘presentism,’’ then show why relativity theory is commonly thought to
imply the former.
