Relativity Theory between Structural and Dynamical Explanations

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Acknowledgements

I am highly indebted to Harvey Brown, Michel Ghins, and Oliver Pooley for their generous comments to a previous version of this review. I also thank Massimo Pauri for useful conversations on some of the topics mentioned in the paper.

Notes

[1] See Brown and Pooley (2005, 79), where we read that explanations of contractions in terms of four‐dimensionality and the structure of Minkowski space‐time are ‘perfectly acceptable explanations (perhaps the only acceptable explanations) of the explananda in question.’ I thank Oliver Pooley for having reminded me of this passage.

[2] Newton was well aware that such an existence claim could be false for ordinary bodies, and this is the main reason why he postulated absolute space; after the elimination of absolute space, for the law of inertia to have empirical meaning, it could be sufficient to have moving bodies that are approximately inertial.

[3] There are two appendixes to the book, one devoted to the change of attitudes in Einstein's view of covariance, the other to STR and non‐locality.

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Notes on contributors

Mauro Dorato

Mauro Dorato is at the Department of Philosophy, University of Rome 3.