Philosophia Naturalis / Temporal Existence and Persistence in Spacetime

Relativity still challenges the philosophy of time: Although several sophisticated theories of temporal existence and persistence have been developed in the last decades, there is still an ongoing debate about how to apply the various concepts to spacetime theories and about whether those distinctions are even relevant at all for the ontology of spacetime. As it turns out to be the case, the ontologists of spacetime physics could broadly be arranged into two different camps: The first group is concerned with the apparently central question in the philosophy of (space-)time, i.e., whether the present is ontologically distinguished. The second deals with the problem of temporal change: Material objects persist through (space-)time and survive change - how do they manage to do so? Both debates have reached a high level of specialized, even "overspecialized," discourse and need to be interrelated. Accordingly, the main purpose of this volume is to bring together "temporal existence" and "persistence" in spacetime.