On the alleged incompatibility of presentism and temporal parts

Philosophia (United States)

Volumn 27, Issue 1-2, 1999, Pages 253-260

  Lombard, Lawrence Brian ^a  

^a WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 52649134738     PISSN: 00483893     EISSN: 15749274     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF02381006     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. Trenton Merricks, "On the Incompatibility of Enduring and Perduring Entities", Mind, Vol. 104 (July, 1995), pp. 523-531. All parenthetical references will be to this paper. Merricks' paper was read at the meetings of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, on April 14, 1995. The present paper is a version of part of the comments on his paper that I read at those meetings.
2. Heraclitus thought that one could not step into the same river twice. He held that to change is to become different in the sense of becoming a different thing. Thus he held that there is change--the going out of and coming into existence of things-but that no thing endures through any change. A world in which there are perduring, but no enduring, entities is, I think, Heraclitean. A thing's coming into or going out of existence is not a change in the thing which comes into or goes out of existence, since it does not, in coming into or going out of existence come to have (or lack) a property that it previously lacked (or had).
3. Like Heraclitus, Parmenides believed that to change is to become a different thing. But Parmenides believed that nothing could become different from itself; and so he denied that things can change.
4. I am here following Merricks' numbering. I am not sure that I know what to make of this thesis about time. Does it mean (assuming the existence of times) that all times exist? When? Now? At some time or other? Of course, not all times exist now. Of course, all times exist at some time or other. I am not just certain that I see what the claim is supposed to be.
5. See her excellent paper on this familiar and correct point, "Endurance and Temporary Intrinsics", Analysis, Vol. 49 (June, 1989), pp. 119-25.
6. E.J. Lowe's, "The Problem of Intrinsic Change: Rejoinder to Lewis", Analysis, Vol. 48 (March, 1988), pp. 72-77.
7. The two-place relation, expressed by 'x exemplifies F', is so defined as to be ambiguous between 'x exemplifies F at the present time' and 'x exemplifies F at all times'; and this is right, since the tense of 'exemplifies' is ambiguous between a present tense and an omni-temporal reading.
8. See Merricks' paper, "Endurance and Indiscernibility", Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XCI, No. 4 (April, 1994), pp. 165-84, for an excellent discussion of what it means to say of some thing that it exists in its entirety at a time t. This paper also contains an illuminating discussion of what an endurantist semantics for phrases of the form 'O at t' should be, if one took them to be referring expressions.
9. Mark Heller (in effect) introduces this second sense of 'exists at the present time' in "Things Change", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LII, No. 3 (September, 1992), p. 701.
10. "The Doctrine of Temporal Parts and the 'No-Change' Objection", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LIV, No. 2 (June, 1994), pp. 365-72.
11. To say this is not (necessarily) to attribute Merricks the view that physical objects are really enduring things. It is, rather, to suggest that the idea that physical objects endure is a natural, commonsensical view, and that such an idea may well have slipped into Merricks' thinking.
12. I cannot serve a two-year sentence for robbery during a fifteen minute period of time; but I can be serving that sentence during such a fifteen minute period. 12. My thanks go to Michael McKinsey for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this paper.