substantivalism

English

Etymology

From substantival +‎ -ism.

Noun

substantivalism (plural substantivalisms)

  1. (philosophy) The doctrine that space and time have an existence independent of physical things.
    • 1994, John Stachel, John Earman, ‎Allen Janis, ‎Gerald J. Massey, editors, Philosophical Problems of the Internal and External Worlds‎, →ISBN, page 143:
      Several philosophers of science have argued that the general theory of relativity actually supports spacetime substantivalism (if not separate spatial and temporal substantivalisms) since it allows solutions consisting of nothing but a differentiable manifold with metric tensor field […]
    • 2007 October 30, Gabriele Contessa, “A Note on the Nomic Possibility of a Dynamic Shift”, in Erkenntnis, volume 68, number 2, DOI:10.1007/s10670-007-9085-7:
      In it, Clarke defends on behalf of Newton a form of substantivalism according to which (absolute) space exists independently of matter and is as real as matter.
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