  This paper elaborates on relationalism about space and time as motivated by a
minimalist ontology of the physical world: there are only matter points that
are individuated by the distance relations among them, with these relations
changing. We assess two strategies to combine this ontology with physics, using
classical mechanics as example: the Humean strategy adopts the standard,
non-relationalist physical theories as they stand and interprets their formal
apparatus as the means of bookkeeping of the change of the distance relations
instead of committing us to additional elements of the ontology. The
alternative theory strategy seeks to combine the relationalist ontology with a
relationalist physical theory that reproduces the predictions of the standard
theory in the domain where these are empirically tested. We show that, as
things stand, this strategy cannot be accomplished without compromising a
minimalist relationalist ontology.

History and Philosophy of Physics