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The history of the development of physics is full of arguments and debates about whether space and time are absolute or relational. Just what does this contrast mean? Absolutists hold that there are two manifolds to which spatial and temporal concepts apply. There is an array of things and a sequence of events, and there is also an array of places and a sequence of moments at which such things and events can be located. Relationists assert that only the arrays of things and events are real. It follows that spatial and temporal concepts refer to certain relations between things and between events. Analysis shows that spatial and temporal concepts express the conditions of identity and difference, upon which the individuation of things and events depends. For example two non-identical things that co-exist must be related by 'spatial separation", and so on. The argument against absolutism, that is against the interpretation of spatial and temporal relations in terms only of the locations and moments of a spatio-temporal manifold that is independent of the material system of the world, would be greatly strengthened if the redundancy of an independent space-time could be established from an analysis of the conceptual structure of physics itself.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-4704-0_8

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