In Defense of Mereological Universalism

Rea, Michael C.

doi:10.2307/2653513

Cited by 118 publications

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“…8 He then uses temporal parthood at a time to confirm that his account says what perdurantists want to say; he claims that his account of perdurance entails that perduring things have a temporal part at every time at which they exist ( [13], pp. 205-6).…”

Section: I2 Sider's Neutral Accounts Of Temporal Parthood and Parthomentioning

confidence: 91%

The Endurance/Perdurance Distinction

McKinnon¹

2002

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

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It is now usual to say that something persists iff it is located at more than one time. This neutral term gives us a means of framing the question, how does a thing persist? One answer is to say that a thing's persistence involves its perduring. What is it for a thing to perdure? Generally, it has been held that perdurance involves persisting in virtue of having temporal, as well as spatial, parts. And what is it for a thing to endure? Often, this is put in terms of a thing's being wholly present at all times at which it exists. Again, sometimes the endurance/perdurance distinction is put in terms of the difference between strict identity and a looser unity relation sometimes labelled 'genidentity'. On this understanding, a persisting thing endures iff for any time at which the persisting thing is located, there is something which is identical to that thing. A persisting thing perdures iff for any pair of times at which it is located, it has different temporal parts at those times which stand in the genidentity relation to each other.Hopefully the above gives the reader some sort of feeling for what the endurance/perdurance distinction might look like. Unfortunately, none of the suggestions above seem adequate to capture the distinction. For instance, the idea that a thing's endurance can be captured in terms of being its being 'wholly present at all times at which it is located' has been shown by Theodore Sider [13] to be problematic. He says that for an endurantist parthood is an irreducibly temporally relative matter. Contrast the situation for endurance with the situation for perdurance. We can state without temporal indexing what parts a perduring thing has. What parts a perduring thing has, it has simpliciter. These parts have the further property of being located at various times. On the other hand, we cannot state what parts an enduring thing has without mentioning the times relative to which it has those parts.But if this is so, what can it mean to say that an enduring thing is wholly present at a time? The intended idea was, perhaps, to say that for any time at which an enduring thing is located, all of its parts are located at that time. However, once we admit that, for the endurantist, parthood at a time is irreducibly temporally relative, we realise that there is a blank to fill in: being wholly present at a time is to have all of its parts … when??? … located at that time? Since enduring things don't have parts simpliciter, a statement like 'a is a part of enduring thing b' must always be qualified with a time reference. The problem is, how can we fill in the blank while charting a course between triviality (all of its parts relative to that time are located at that time) and absurdity (all of its parts relative to some other time are located at that time)? (Sider [13], p. 209.) What of the idea that we can use strict identity to capture endurance? Trenton Merricks brings to light a problem with this approach ([6], p. 427). It is not only the endurantist who holds that for any time at which a pers...

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Section: I2 Sider's Neutral Accounts Of Temporal Parthood and Parthomentioning

confidence: 91%

The Endurance/Perdurance Distinction

McKinnon¹

2002

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

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“…An improper part of an object o just is o. 174 Thus; no purely contingent fact exists in every single world… 5 I believe there are complex purely contingent facts that are mereological fusions of simple purely contingent facts (see Rea (1998) and van Cleve (2008) for arguments for mereological universalism). Let us call the sum of all purely contingent facts a maximal purely contingent fact.…”

Section: The Setupmentioning

confidence: 98%

Yet another new cosmological argument

Weaver

2015

Int J Philos Relig

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“…Insofar as Sider is arguing for unrestricted composition, his argument is aimed at those who initially take seriously some other theory of 15 Compare this with the view defended in Markosian (1998). 16 The main lesson of Rea (1998) is that if one holds that being arranged artifact-wise (where this is at least partly an extrinsic matter) is sufficient for composing something, then one must either accept unrestricted composition or admit that extrinsic factors are at least sometimes relevant to whether composition occurs. The reason for this is that (plausibly) for any things, no matter what they are like intrinsically and no matter what their internal arrangement, it is possible that things intrinsically just like those, in just that internal arrangement, be arranged artifact-wise (because, say, some artist put them in precisely that arrangement in fulfillment of a very detailed artistic vision).…”

Section: Objections and Repliesmentioning

confidence: 99%