Endurantist and perdurantist accounts of persistence

Abstract

In this paper, I focus on three issues intertwined in current debates between endurantists and perdurantists-(i) the dimension of persisting objects, (ii) whether persisting objects have timeless, or only time-relative, parts, and (iii) whether persisting objects have proper temporal parts. I argue that one standard endurantist position on the first issue is compatible with standard perdurantist positions on parthood and temporal parts. I further argue that different accounts of persistence depend on the claims about objects' dimensions and not on the auxiliary claims about parthood and temporal parts.

Weak Location

“…Here I wish to address instead another issue: whether this is an adequate characterisation of the debate over persistence. Both Cody Gilmore (, 1227–1230; , §6.3.2) and Maureen Donnelly () offer another view they regard as a kind of endurantism, because it says that persisting objects are temporally extended temporal simples. The same view is discussed, though not given the honorific ‘endurantist’, by Miller () (‘terdurantism’) and Daniels () (‘transdurantism’).…”

“…In this, it resembles perdurantism. If, with Donnelly (, 49), we characterise the endurance/perdurance debate as one over the dimension of the location of persisting objects, this turns out to be a variety of endurance. If we focus instead on the denial that objects which persist in this way are wholly present at each moment at which they exist, then we will not wish to classify it as endurantist.…”

“…Donnelly's claim that ‘the core of the endurantist and perdurantist debate over persistence might be construed as a dispute over how objects are located in spacetime’ (, 49) holds only if exact location is the fundamental relation; and we are assuming it is not. To follow her characterisation, there would have to be one unique best candidate to be the dimension of a material object.…”

Visual Endurance and Auditory Perdurance

“…Another popular explication is to interpret enduring and perduring as different modes of being located in regions of time (Donnelly 2011;Rychter 2011). Let's assume that there is an entity E existing from t 1 to t 5 .…”

HowDoThings Persist? Location Relations in Physics and the Metaphysics of Persistence

“…1 Relevant authors include Balashov (2000Balashov ( , 2002Balashov ( , 2010, Donnelly (2011), Gibson and Pooley (2006), Gilmore (2006Gilmore ( , 2008Gilmore ( , 2013, Hudson (2005) and Parsons (2007Parsons ( , 2008. relativistic spacetimes to provide a unique foliation into spacelike hyperplanes of simultaneity has been thought to provide an argument in favor of perdurance, according to which persisting objects are four-dimensional (Balashov 2000).…”