Einstein and philosophy: A new definition of 'simultaneous'

Einstein's acknowledgement of a serious debt to Hume should alert us to central philosophical—in the first instance, epistemological—aspects of his thinking. We see this in his emphasis on difficulties—initially raised by the discovery that light has a finite speed—in establishing the times of distant happenings. But common articulations in everyday language of the claims of Special Relativity, along with criticisms or corrections of our everyday thought and talk, reflect misconstruals of those. These misconstruals are grounded in two, related, philosophical preconceptions: Cartesian individualism and an aspiration to a view of reality that is free from the contingencies of our nature. When we acknowledge the social dimension of our thought and talk about time, and that what is called for is a proper acknowledgement of those contingencies (cf Wittgenstein), the reports of the physicists may appear in a different light.