It has been argued that Special relativity with its most striking feature, namely that the definition of the present depends on a choice of an inertial frame, actually refutes presentism – the metaphysical view that only present events are real. Contrariwise, it has also been argued that the notion of the present in a relativistic setting is not a matter-of-fact but established by convention and hence devoid of metaphysical interest. In this paper, I contend that, considering Einstein's philosophical motivations for introducing special relativity, both of these assertions are wrong and that the pre-relativistic notion of the present may be retained.