Relationalism about space is a venerable doctrine that is enjoying renewed attention among philosophers and physicists. Relationalists deny that space is ontologically prior to matter and seek to ground all claims about the structure of space in facts about actual and possible configurations of matter. Thus, many relationalists maintain that to say that space is infinite is to say that certain sorts of infinite arrays of material points are possible (even if, in fact, the world contains only a finite amount of matter). This book investigates the distinctive notion of geometric possibility that ... More

Relationalism about space is a venerable doctrine that is enjoying renewed attention among philosophers and physicists. Relationalists deny that space is ontologically prior to matter and seek to ground all claims about the structure of space in facts about actual and possible configurations of matter. Thus, many relationalists maintain that to say that space is infinite is to say that certain sorts of infinite arrays of material points are possible (even if, in fact, the world contains only a finite amount of matter). This book investigates the distinctive notion of geometric possibility that relationalists rely upon. Its over‐arching strategy is to examine the prospects for adapting to the geometric case the standard philosophical accounts of the related notion of physical possibility. The central chapters of the book examine Humean, primitivist, and necessitarian accounts of physical and geometric possibility.