I’m a fan of locational conceptions of endurance. As I put it elsewhere, endurance involves the claim that
persisting objects do so by existing entirely at each moment at which they exist. As it is sometimes put, an enduring object is ‘wholly present’ at each moment at which it exists…. The natural way to understand this locution is in terms of [the] notion of wholly located, so that an enduring object is contained within a temporally unextended region at each time at which it exists. An enduring object is such that if it exists at a time, it wholly exists at that time (it is contained in that time). This entails, of course, that enduring objects are temporally multiply located. (‘Location and Perdurance’, OSM 5, p. 57)
(I first thought about endurance in a locational way after hearing a talk by my colleague Oliver Pooley; the articulation I gave it in the paper cited above owed a substantial debt to my soon-to-be colleague Josh Parsons‘ paper ’Theories of Location’, OSM, 3.)
So far, so orthodox. Let me introduce now another idea. Read the rest of this entry »
