Parthood and Identity Across Time

Thomson, James

doi:10.2307/2026004

Cited by 273 publications

(92 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…And according to Absolutism, this is the only fundamental parthood relation. 12 Many have argued that the fundamental parthood relation for material objects is a three-place relation expressed by 'x is a part of y at z', with two slots for material objects and one slot for a time (Thomson 1983, van Inwagen 1990, Koslicki 2008 or a region of space or spacetime (Rea 1998, Hudson 2001, McDaniel 2004, Donnelly 2010 (Sider 2001). But without temporal parts or a privileged present, the most natural option is to hold that the fundamental parthood relation holding between material objects is a more-than-twoplace relation.…”

Section: Second Compromise: the Many-slice Constitution Viewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building Enduring Objects Out of Spacetime

Gilmore

2014

Synthese Library

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

, eds., Mereology and the Sciences (volume under review at Springer, Synthese Library) Cody Gilmore Endurantism, the view that material objects are wholly present at each moment of their careers, is under threat from supersubstantivalism, the view that material objects are identical to spacetime regions. I discuss three compromise positions. They are alike in that they all take material objects to be composed of spacetime points or regions without being identical to any such point or region. They differ in whether they permit multilocation and in whether they generate cases of mereologically coincident entities. IntroductionLet me start with a rough characterization of two main views about persistence:Endurantism: At least some material objects persist through time; and every material object is temporally unextended and wholly present at each instant at which it exists at all. Moreover, it is not the case that every material object has a different instantaneous temporal part 1 at each different instant at which it exists.Perdurantism: At least some material objects persist through time; any every material object has a different instantaneous temporal part at each different instant at which it exists. Material objects that do persist are temporally extended and are at most partially present (not wholly present) at any one instant.I will introduce more carefully formulated views later on (from Gilmore 2006), but these are adequate for present purposes. Endurantism fits comfortably with presentism and certain other A-theorist of time.2 It also fits together fairly well with a certain brand of B-theoretic eternalism. What I have in mind here is a view like Newton's, according to which substantival space and substantival time are two separate and fundamental entities, and spacetime, if there is such a thing at all, is merely a construct of some sort. (Perhaps spacetime points are identified with ordered pairs.) Call this view about space and time 'separatist substantivalism'; it should be understood as incorporating eternalism and the B-theory. 1 The standard definition of 'instantaneous temporal part' runs as follows: 'x is an instantaneous temporal part of y at t' means '(i) t is an instant, (ii) x is a part of y at t, (iii) x overlaps-at-t every part-at-t of y, (iii) x is present at t, and (iv) x is not present at any other instant'. (This is based on Sider (2001: 59).) For other definitions, see Gibson and Pooley (2006: 163), Parsons (2007), and Balashov (2010: 73). The key point is that, in order for a thing y to count as a temporal part of a thing x, y must be a part of x and y must be spatially co-located with x at any moment at which y is present. 2 A-theories of time all say that there is a time that is present in some absolute, not-merely-indexical sense. That is, they say that there is a 'metaphysically privileged' present time. The B-theory of time denies this. Presentism is an A-theory of time according to which there are no non-present entities (such as, presumably, p...

show abstract

Section: Second Compromise: the Many-slice Constitution Viewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building Enduring Objects Out of Spacetime

Gilmore

2014

Synthese Library

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This means that in an ontology of endurant entities it is insufficient to say of endurants x and y that a certain top-level relation holds between them, because the relations which hold will be different at different points in time (Simons 1987, Lowe 2002. To take this time-dependent character of relations into account we include time instants as a fourth category in our ontology and add a temporal parameter to time-dependent relations (Thomson 1983, Simons 1987. For example, to take the time-dependent character of the parthood and location relations into account, we say that x is a part of y at time t 1 but x is no longer part of y at time t 2 , or that x is located in y at t 1 but is no longer located in y at t 2 .…”

Section: Top-level Categories Of Entities and Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2.2), are important for geographic data standards. Our work benefits from a long tradition in philosophy which deals with questions of identity and change over time and the semantics of relations such as part-of, subclass-of, and instance-of (Simons 1987, Casati and Varzi 1999, Thomson 1983, and from recent work in knowledge representation, for example, by Guarino et al (Guarino and Welty 2000b,a). This paper contributes to this literature by developing and implementing an axiomatic theory of timedependent spatial relations in a logically rigorous manner in the context of reasoning about geographic information.…”

Section: Appendix: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A spatio-temporal ontology for geographic information integration

Bittner

Donnelly

Smith

2009

International Journal of Geographical Information Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper presents an axiomatic formalisation of a theory of top-level relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the sub-universal relation among universals and the parthood relation among individuals, as well as cross-categorial relations such as instantiation and membership. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations -in particular their behavior with respect to time -is critical for geographic information processing.The axiomatic theory is developed using Isabelle, a computational system for implementing logical formalisms. All proofs are computerverified and the computational representation of the theory is available online.

show abstract

“…For them, events are essentially different as they occur in time (and thus are often called "occurrents") while objects exist through time (Hacker, 1982), and thus are sometimes called continuants or endurants. For many authors, continuants are thus not to be considered as having a temporal extension (Simons, 1987;Geach, 1972;Thomson, 1983). A lot of objects only have a limited existence, unfortunately, so there must also be an existence function in an ontology of continuants, and a need for a theory of change of these entities.…”

Section: Occurrents Vs Continuants Ontologymentioning

confidence: 99%

The temporal essence of spatial objects

Muller¹

2007

The Categorization of Spatial Entities in Language and Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Parthood and Identity Across Time

Cited by 273 publications

References 0 publications

Building Enduring Objects Out of Spacetime

Building Enduring Objects Out of Spacetime

A spatio-temporal ontology for geographic information integration

The temporal essence of spatial objects

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About