The CEU Department of Philosophy cordially invites you to a talk

(as part of its Departmental Colloquium series)

by

Sydney Shoemaker (Cornell University)

on

"Persistence and Properties"  

Tuesday, 12 November, 2013, 5.30 PM Zrinyi 14, Room 412

ABSTRACT

                The paper defends three-dimensionalism about ordinary objects, and rejects both the four-dimensionalist view that such objects are “space-time worms” and the “stage theory” that they are momentary thing-stages.  It allows that there are entities of which four-dimensionalism is true, entities having temporal parts, and that there is a sense in which the existence of ordinary objects is grounded in the existence of such entities.  But ordinary objects cannot themselves be such entities.  This is because of the kinds of properties they have.  On the one hand these are “temporally local,” in the sense that their instantiation at a time does not constitutively depend on what is true at other times.  But they are individuated by causal profiles that point towards the future careers of the things that have them, requiring that such successor states as their instantiations have be related to them in certain ways, these being ways that constitute the persistence of the objects over time.  Space-time worms and momentary stages cannot have properties of this sort.