Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Authors’ Abstract

1. 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.
   1. One is the B-theory of time, according to which the past, present, and future are all equally real and there is nothing metaphysically special about the present.
   2. A second is ‘spacetime unitism’ (as we call it), 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.
   3. A third is perdurantism¹, according to which persisting material objects (rocks, trees, human beings) are made up of different temporal parts located at different times.
2. We sketch routes from relativity to the B-theory and to unitism. We then discuss some routes to perdurantism², via the B-theory and via unitism.