Introduction: Meyer’s objection

Repeating the well-known objections to presentism, Ulrich Meyer (2005) attempts to show that presentism, which claims, roughly, that only the present exists, is either trivial or untenable. He does it, however, using a line of reasoning which unfortunately contains flaws and is indefensible. I shall criticize his reasoning and next show that the debate between presentism and eternalism is not only genuine but also concerns a deep metaphysical problem of our world.

I shall begin with Meyer’s minor mistake: he mentioned Sklar (1981) as one of the authors who “argue that presentism is incompatible with the theory of relativity, and thus false a posteriori” (Meyer 2005: 213). However, contrary to what is claimed by Meyer, in “Time, Reality, and Relativity” and his other papers, Sklar did not maintain that presentism is incompatible with the theory of relativity. Indeed, just the opposite is true, as Sklar wrote: “One thing is certain. Acceptance of relativity cannot force one into acceptance or rejection of any of the traditional metaphysical views about the reality of past and future.”

This point is interesting because, since the discovery of the theory of relativity, there have been debates about metaphysical consequences of this theory regarding the objectivity of the distinction between the past, the present, and the future with many physicists and philosophers on both sides of the fence: let us recall that Einstein, Weyl, Russell, Quine, Putnam, Smart, Lewis, Mellor, Horwich stand on one side (as denying this possibility), and Heisenberg, von Weizsäker, Jeans, Broad, Shimony, Prior and Stein on the other (as accepting it).