John Earman

John Earman (born 1942) is an American philosopher of physics. He is an emeritus professor in the History and Philosophy of Science department at the University of Pittsburgh. He has also taught at UCLA, the Rockefeller University, and the University of Minnesota, and was president of the Philosophy of Science Association. He received his PhD from Princeton in 1968.

John Earman was born in Washington, D.C. in 1942 and earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1968 with a dissertation on temporal asymmetry directed by Carl Gustav Hempel and Paul Benacerraf. After holding professorships at UCLA, the Rockefeller University, and the University of Minnesota, he joined the faculty of the History and Philosophy of Science department of the University of Pittsburgh in 1985. He remained at Pittsburgh for the rest of his career, recently retiring to become Professor Emeritus. Earman is a former president of the Philosophy of Science Association and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. He is a member of the Archive Board of the Phil-Sci Archive.

Earman has notably contributed to debate about the "hole argument". The hole argument was invented for slightly different purposes by Albert Einstein late in 1913 as part of his quest for the general theory of relativity (GTR). It was revived and reformulated in the modern context by John3 (a short form for the "three Johns": John Earman, John Stachel, and John Norton).

With the GTR, the traditional debate between absolutism and relationalism has been shifted to whether or not spacetime is a substance, since the GTR largely rules out the existence of, e.g., absolute positions. The "hole argument" offered by John Earman is a powerful argument against manifold substantialism.

...
Wikipedia