Abstract
Perdurantists think of continuants as mereological sums of stages (that is, sums of instantaneous spatiotemporal parts) from different times. This view of persistence would force us to drop the idea that there is genuine change in the world. By exploiting a presentist metaphysics, Brogaard (The Monist, 83, 341–354 2000) proposed a theory, called presentist four-dimensionalism, that aims to reconcile perdurantism with the idea that things undergo real change. However, her proposal commits us to reject the idea that stages must exist in their entirety. Giving up the tenet that all the stages are equally real could be a price that perdurantists are unwilling to pay. I argue that Kit Fine (2005)’s fragmentalism provides us with the tools to combine a presentist metaphysics with a perdurantist theory of persistence without giving up the idea that reality is constituted by more than purely present stages.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
See Sider (2001: 140-208) for more details.
See also Fine (2006).
Cf. Fine (2006: 399-400).
See Fine (2006: 400).
Obviously, the whole argument is based on the assumption that reality is complex enough to allow for qualitative variations through time.
Martin Lipman (2015), for instance, examines a primitive notion of coherence in terms of co-obtainment of tensed facts.
For the distinction between weak and strong (past and) future facts see Ciuni and Torrengo (2013).
To keep things simple, I take the future to be linear. Those who prefer to adopt a branching time model can reformulate this argument by employing only past-tensed sentences as examples. Furthermore, I will avoid complications arising from relativistic considerations on the nature of spacetime.
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for pushing me to discuss this objection.
Tallant’s arguments are not limited to perdurantism and stage view, since he holds that even the conjunction of presentism and endurantism proves to be problematic. Discussing the relations between presentism and endurantist theories of persistence would be far beyond the scope of this paper. For this reason, I will set aside an argument that Tallant proposes in order to attack “the general idea that presentism is compatible with identity over time” (2018: 2213), focusing on the arguments that explicitly involve perdurantism and the stage view.
See also Lowe (2012: 95).
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for this journal, Giuliano Torrengo, Giuseppe Spolaore, and Nick Young for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.
References
Benovsky, J. (2009). Presentism and persistence. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 90, 291–309.
Brogaard, B. (2000). Presentist Four-Dimensionalism. The Monist, 83, 341–354.
Ciuni, R., & Torrengo, G. (2013). Presentism and cross-temporal relations. In Ciuni, R., Miller, K., Torrengo, G. (Eds.) New papers on the present: Focus on presentism. Munich: Philosophia Verlag.
Fine, K. (2005). Tense and reality. In Fine, K. (Ed.) Modality and tense (pp. 261–320). Oxford: OUP.
Fine, K. (2006). The reality of tense. Synthese, 150, 399–414.
Hawley, K. (2001). How things persist. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Heller, M. (1992). Things change. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 52, 695–704.
Lewis, D. (1986). On the plurality of worlds. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lipman, M. (2015). On fine’s fragmentalism. Philosophical Studies, 172, 3119–3133.
Lombard, L. (1986). Events: a metaphysical study. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Lowe, E. J. (2010). Ontological dependence. In Zalta, E.N. (Ed.) The Standford encyclopedia of philosophy. 2010th edn. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/dependence-ontological/: Springer.
Lowe, E. J. (2012). Against Monism. In Goff, P. (Ed.) Spinoza on Monism (pp. 92–122). London: Palgave Macmillan.
McTaggart, J. M. E. (1908). The unreality of time. Mind, 17, 457–474.
Sider, T. (1996). All the world’s a stage. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74, 433–453.
Sider, T. (2000). The stage view and temporary intrinsics. Analysis, 60, 84–88.
Sider, T. (2001). Four-Dimensionalism: An ontology of persistence and time. Oxford: OUP.
Tallant, J. (2018). Presentism, persistence and trans-temporal dependence. Philosophical Studies, 175, 2209–2220.
Varzi, A. (2003). Naming the stages. Dialectica, 57, 387–412.
Funding
The author has been funded by REGIONE LOMBARDIA and CARIPLO FOUNDATION (Project 2015-0746-TEMPFRAME, 15-5-3007000-601) and by FRATELLI CONFALONIERI FOUNDATION (Postdoctoral Fellowship 2018/2019).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Iaquinto, S. Fragmentalist Presentist Perdurantism. Philosophia 47, 693–703 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-0016-4
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-0016-4