Tense and Relativity

Those inclined to positions in the philosophy of time that take tense seriously have typically assumed that not all regions of space‐time are equal: one special region of space‐time corresponds to what is presently happening. When combined with assumptions from modern physics this has the unsettling consequence that the shape of this favored region distinguishes people in certain places or people traveling at certain velocities. In this paper I shall attempt to avoid this result by developing a tensed picture of reality that is nonetheless consistent with ‘hypersurface egalitarianism’—the view that all hypersurfaces are equal.