Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-20T18:15:00.154Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Persistence and Properties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2015

SYDNEY SHOEMAKER
SYDNEY SHOEMAKER*
Affiliation:
CORNELL UNIVERSITY [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

If for every portion of space-time there is an object composed of its contents, four-dimensionalism will be true of these objects. But ordinary objects—trees, stones, persons, etc.—are not among these objects (although the series of events that make up their careers will be). The properties of ordinary objects, including sortal properties, are temporally local and have causal profiles that incorporate transtemporal persistence conditions of the things that have them, and this supports a rejection of four-dimensionalism in favor of three-dimensionalism as an account of the nature of these ordinary objects. Also rejected is the stage theory that takes ordinary objects to be momentary stages (whose transtemporal sameness is not identity), and the argument (of Katherine Hawley) that holds that stage theory is supported by the fact that there can be cases in which it is indeterminate whether the same thing exists at different times.

Keywords

metaphysicsontologyD-fusionenduranceperdurancepersistence condition
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , Fall 2015 , pp. 433 - 448
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Della Rocca, Michael. (2011) ‘Primitive Persistence and the Impasse between Three-Dimensionalism and Four-Dimensionalism’. Journal of Philosophy, 108, 591–616.Google Scholar
Hawley, Katherine. (2001) How Things Persist. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, John. (2006) ‘Three-Dimensionalism’. In Hawthorne, Metaphysical Essays. (New York: Oxford University Press), 85–109.Google Scholar
Lewis, David. (1986) On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Shoemaker, Sydney. (2007) Physical Realization. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Shoemaker, Sydney. (2013) ‘Realization without Preemption’. In Gibb, S. C., Lowe, E. J., and Ingthorsson, R. D. (eds.), Mental Causation and Ontology. New York: Oxford University Press), 35–57.Google Scholar
Sider, Theodore. (2001) Four Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar