Bringing back intrinsics to enduring things
- PDF / 509,071 Bytes
- 22 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 71 Downloads / 219 Views
Bringing back intrinsics to enduring things Andrea C. Bottani1
Received: 2 August 2014 / Accepted: 4 July 2016 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Abstract According to David Lewis, the argument from temporary intrinsics is ‘the principal and decisive objection against endurance’. I focus on eternalist endurantism, discussing three different ways the eternalist endurantist can try to avoid treating temporary intrinsics as relational. Two of them, generally known as ‘adverbialism’ and ‘SOFism’, are familiar and controversial. I scrutinize them and argue that Lewis’ scepticism about them is well founded. Then, I sketch a further, to some extent new, version of eternalist endurantism, where the key idea is that intrinsic monadic properties had simpliciter by objects are eternal, time-transcendent properties in Fine’s sense, i.e., properties had by objects regardless of time. Eternal properties of an object are ipso facto sempiternal (i.e., had by the object whenever it exists). When something is P at one time and not P at another, it is radically indeterminate (which does not mean ‘neither true nor false’) whether it is P simpliciter or not. I argue that an account along these lines is better placed to treat intrinsic monadic properties of changing objects than any other known alternatives insofar as (1) it recognizes that something is P simpliciter (where P is monadic); (2) it is able to account for x’s being P at a time in terms of something’s being P simpliciter; (3) it has an answer to the question ‘is x P simpliciter?’ when x is P at one time and not P at another. I conclude that endurantism is no less at ease with intrinsics than perdurantism is. Keywords David Lewis · Change · Persistence · Endurantism · Perdurantism · Intrinsic/extrinsic
B 1
Andrea C. Bottani [email protected] Department of Letters and Philosophy, University of Bergamo, Via Pignolo 123, 24121 Bergamo, Italy
123
Synthese
1 Persistence and temporary intrinsics In the mid-eighties, David Lewis developed an argument for perdurantism that has since become known as the argument from ‘temporary intrinsics’ (roughly, those properties that are temporary inasmuch as they are gained or lost and intrinsic inasmuch as they are had by things just in virtue of how they are, regardless of their relations with anything else). The argument has prompted an extensive and ongoing discussion, in spite of the fact that Lewis’s presentation of the point is extremely laconic, taking the form of a short passage in a famous volume devoted to a presentation and defense of his realistic approach to modality.1 Lewis’s aim in developing the argument was to establish a close connection between the problem of persistence across time and the problem of qualitative change. The intended conclusion of the argument is that things persist by having different temporal parts at different times. The structure of the argument is simple. First, a problem is described. Persistent objects have incompatible intrinsic properties at different times, for example the
Data Loading...
