Neat find! I haven't read all of it yet, but I found this striking:

It was precisely the view, that successful abstractions should not be regarded as representing something real, that prevented Lorentz from discovering special relativity. He believed that the time t of an observer at rest with respect to the aether (which is a genuine example of reifying an unsuccessful abstraction) was the true time, whereas the quantity t of another observer, moving with respect to the first, was merely an abstraction that did not represent anything real in the world. Lorentz himself admitted the failure of his approach:

The chief cause of my failure was my clinging to the idea that the variable t only can be considered as the true time and that my local time t must be regarded as no more than an auxiliary mathematical quantity. In Einstein's theory, on the contrary, t plays the same part as t; if we want to describe phenomena in terms of x , y , z , t we must work with these variables exactly as we could do with x, y, z, t.

This reminds me of Mach's Principle: Anti-Epiphenomenal Physics:

When you see a seemingly contingent equality - two things that just happen to be equal, all the time, every time - it may be time to reformulate your physics so that there is one thing instead of two. The distinction you imagine is epiphenomenal; it has no experimental consequences. In the right physics, with the right elements of reality, you would no longer be able to imagine it.