The Endurance/Perdurance Distinction

Abstract

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...

Theories of persistence

“…Effingham briefly considers the suggestion that perdurantism should be understood as a view about how things persist (rather than a view about what things exist), but dismisses this idea as ''murky'' (ibid). 5 For other accounts along these lines, see Crisp (2003: 216), Crisp and Smith (2005: 319), Effingham (2009: 301), Gilmore (2008Gilmore ( : 1224, Heller (1984: 325-329), Hudson (2001: 58-59), Markosian (1994), Markosian and Carroll (2010: 172), McGrath (2007: 730), McKinnon (2002), Merricks (1999), Miller (2009, Parsons (2007), Sider (2001: 59), van Inwagen (1990), Wasserman (2004: 75), and Wikipedia (''Perdurantism or perdurance theory is a philosophical theory of persistence… The perdurantist view is that an individual has distinct temporal parts throughout its existence.''). 6 See, for example, Crisp (2003: 216), Hawley (2010: Sect.…”

Endurantist and perdurantist accounts of persistence

“…6 But most participants in these debates agree that at least those endurantists who endorse eternalism and deny mereological essentialism 7 must treat parthood as a time-relative relation. See, e.g., Sider (2001), McKinnon (2002), Olson (2006). Hawley (2001) takes a rejection of atemporal parthood to be one of the defining features of endurantism.…”

Visual Endurance and Auditory Perdurance

“…There is no consensus where exactly a line should be drawn that separates endurants from perdurants among the above four types of entities (Miller 2009;McKinnon 2002;Wasserman 2004). However, there is an agreement that entities belonging to (1) are paradigmatic perdurants, those belonging to (4) are paradigmatic endurants, and categories (2) and (3) describe some intermediate options.…”