Abstract
The literature offers us several characterizations of temporal parts via spatial co-location: According to these accounts, temporal parts are roughly parts that are of the same spatial size as their wholes. It has been argued that such definitions fail with entities outside space. The present chapter investigates the extent to which such criticism works.
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth noting that there is a failure because on one hand there is a suggested formal definition of temporal parts, on the other, there is an already established intuitive notion and several paradigmatic examples of temporal parts. The failure consists in the fact that the suggested formal definition does not capture all and only temporal parts. In this sense, the aim of this chapter is different from Parsons’ (2007). Parsons’ aim is to correctly define perdurantism. He wants a definition of temporal part adequate only with respect to this aim, and not (primarily) in comparison with the already established notion of temporal part.
- 2.
Here ‘weak’ means only that it works in a larger number of systems than the other.
- 3.
In what follows, I shall focus on instants, instantaneous locations and instantaneous temporal parts. Nevertheless, I shall provide the temporally extended counterparts in footnotes. In the first place, let T, T', … be variables for intervals of time. I shall not consider here what the temporally extended counterparts would be in the case of time being gunky or in the case of there being extended simples.
- 4.
Casati and Varzi (1999) and Parsons (2007) offer insightful considerations about location in general. I will not summarize their conclusions here. When I speak of location, I mean Parsons’ exact location, e.g. the exact temporal location of Bertrand Russell is the interval between his birth (8 May, 1872) and his death (2 February, 1970). It is also worth noting that here I am introducing a triadic predicate, a piece of language, and I remain neutral, as much as possible, about the ontological counterpart of this predicate, i.e. I am not introducing a triadic relation.
- 5.
Here, I am assuming that an object has a unique (exact) spatial location at a time.
- 6.
Philosophers holding a spatial criterion of identity for objects or events could find this claim problematic, but this is a question we shall not consider here.
- 7.
In this chapter, I will focus on proper temporal parts. In order to get improper temporal parts, it suffices to add the identity case by disjunction (i.e. x is an improper part of y iff x is a proper part of y or x is identical to y).
- 8.
Because of the significant formal similarities between the spatial and temporal location, I will keep a similar symbol for both. In any case, it is important to recognize the difference between the binary predicate introduced here (temporal location) and the triadic predicate introduced before (spatial location at a time).
- 9.
There is a second criticism that has been moved against Definition 14.3. The idea is that Definition 14.3 captures also tropes for shapes of objects, which are intuitively not temporal parts (Sider 2001, p. 59).
Nevertheless, according to a plausible principle about parthood, if x is a part of y, then x and y are entities of the same sort. If this is the case, then a trope for shape cannot be, strictly speaking, a part of an object, and therefore does not satisfy the first conjunct of Definition 14.3. The present rejection of this second criticism relies on the assumption that tropes are not objects and objects are not tropes. Whether or not this assumption is true is a question I shall not consider here.
- 10.
If I had to justify this implication, I would say that I cannot conceive of an entity that is both outside space and has some parts in space. And even if there were such an entity, it would have some parts outside space. In this case, consider one of these parts outside space and you will find the same problem I am outlining here.
References
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful for support from Swiss National Science Foundation (FNS Ph.D. scholarship, part of the Pro*Doc project ‘Mind and Reality’research module ‘Essentialism and the Mind’, led by Kevin Mulligan and Fabrice Correia). I am also grateful to Kevin Mulligan, Alessandro Giordani, Fabrice Correia and Alberto Tassoni their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Costa, D. (2014). Temporal Parts and Spatial Location. In: Reboul, A. (eds) Mind, Values, and Metaphysics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04199-5_14
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