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Adoption of an A- or B-Theory of time seems to involve commitment to radically different understandings of what it is to be an object or thing. Borrowing terminology suggested by Mark Johnston,¹ we may say that an endurantist holds that objects exist wholly at any time at which they exist, that is to say, an object which exists at any time t does not have at t parts which do not exist at class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">t. More positively, an endurantist holds that an object which exists at one time is identical to that object existing at another time.² For the endurantist, persistence through time consists in an object's existing at several successive times, being wholly present and remaining self-identical at each of those times. By contrast, what we may call a perdurantist holds that an object does not exist wholly at any one time (unless its total temporal history lasts only for an instant) but is identical with the whole temporally extended entity; for a spatio-temporal object this would be what is marked off as its world line on a spacetime diagram. Sections of the line correspond to temporal parts of the object, of which the object itself is composed. For obvious reasons, perdurantism is often called four-dimensionalism, and perduring objects four-dimensional objects. This nomenclature is, however, a misnomer, for it gratuitously assumes that all temporal objects are also spatial objects.³ But abstract objects such as propositions which change their truth values, God, and angels may be conceived as non-spatial temporal objects, in which case we should speak of one-dimensionalism. The salient point of perdurantism is that an object is to be regarded as the entire temporally extended whole and the temporal slice of that object at any moment as a temporal part of the object. Persistence through time consists in just being temporally extended.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-3473-8_9

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