Abstract
I shall not argue against the two main theses of van Inwagen’s paper: the idea that persons, cats and trees are three-dimensional entities lacking temporal parts; and the attack on the ‘fallacy of adverb pasting’, adverb pasting being a certain reading of the semantic role temporal qualifications play in predicative sentences, i.e. the tendency to attach them to singular terms rather than to predicates. Even if I shall not discuss these central issues, I shall deny their purported relationship, the idea that four-dimensionalism can be in some way “entailed”, “produced” or “generated” by the fallacy of adverb pasting. My thesis will be that four-dimensionalism and adverb pasting are quite independent of one another. In addition, I shall say something about the notion of a temporal part. For a major aim of van Inwagen’s paper is to define a clear, neutral concept of a temporal part in terms of which the thesis that ordinary objects have temporal proper parts can be understood, and so asserted or denied. I will claim that van Inwagen’s definition of ‘temporal part’ is not acceptable, nor does it make easier for the enemy of temporal parts to state her case. In my commentary, the latter point comes first, the former later.
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Notes
It might be objected that what is a temporally flat stage of me in the actual world could be a temporally thick object in some other possible worlds. If so, L, could lose and gain the property of being seated, even if it does not do so in the actual world. I have no clear intuitions about that matter, particularly if the background modal semantics is counterpart theory. For the relation of counterparthood is inconstant, and I am not sure there cannot be a sense of ‘counterpart of’ in which a temporally flat stage of me has in some worlds one or more temporally thick counterparts (though that would seem to me to be very strange). What seems to me to be certain is the general point that, if objects have stages in Lewis’s sense, then there are properties which are temporary for some objects but not for some of their stages in Lewis’s sense. Take a biological organism of the species homo sapiens and the zygote it was. Lewis would say that the zygote is a stage of the organism. But the property of being seated, though temporary for the biological organism, is not temporary for the zygote, for no zygote can be seated at any time (not even, I would dare to say, in counterpart theory). Since the same holds for the property of not being seated, the zygote’s career could not be part of the organism’s career, and so the zygote could not be a Lewis-part of the organism.
May be that all qualitative properties, even dog or animal,are momentary in this weakest sense. For, if we observed a dog gradually developing into a lycaon, we would not say that one living organism is dead and another has taken its place (the same, mutatis mutandis,if we observed a plant gradually developing into an animal in virtue of its metabolism). If so, the charitable interpretation of ‘Lewis-part’ would not be so charitable. For the property of being a person would be momentary simpliciter and so it would be in the set of properties that the career of any person assigns to any moment at which that person exists. But the property of being a person would never be in the set of properties the career of a stage of a person assigns to a moment, for no person stage is a person at any time. Hence, no stage of a person (no matter whether person stages exist or not) could be a Lewis-part of any person. After all, however, there might be at least some qualitative properties which are not momentary simpliciter (i.e. no object can have them at one moment and lack them at another), in particular all last sortal properties, such as living organism,and perhaps person.
At any rate, even if the problem could in some way be resolved, the restriction to simple temporary properties would not solve the problem it is intended to solve. For consider the property of being old. It does not seem to be a complex property, and it is undoubtedly temporary (objects can gain it). But, if an object x is old at a time t,certainly there are many stages of x in Lewis’s sense that are not old at t (some of them may even be born just at t,though all are stages of something that is old at t). On the contrary, no Lewis-part of x in van Inwagen’s sense can exist at t without having at t the property of being old, for Lewis-parts have to inherit, at any moment t of their existence, all the temporary properties that the objects they are Lewis-parts of have at t. Once again, the conclusion is that many Lewis-parts in van Inwagen’s sense are not temporal parts in Lewis’s sense. Moreover, in the previous sentence, ‘many’ can be replaced by ‘all’ on the following grounds. Suppose that, for any precise age an object can be, there is a property X such that any object has X iff it is exactly that age. And suppose that, for any precise length of time an object will still persist, there is a property Y such that any object has Y iff it will persist exactly for that length. If there are such kinds of properties, at any moment any object has to have exactly one property of the first kind and one property of the second kind. But, for any property of the first kind and any property of the second kind an object x has at t,no y can have the same two properties at t and be a proper temporal part of x. For a temporal part of an object x can be proper only if it is shorter than x. Hence, no object can have a proper temporal part whose career is part of its career, and no proper temporal part of any object can be a Lewis-part of that object.
I have argued above that, when the enemy of temporal parts claims that the notion of a temporal part is unintelligible, she is better interpreted as simply saying that it’s impossible that ordinary things have any temporal parts. If so, there is no notion to be in need of explanation here.
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Bottani, A. (2002). Van Inwagen on Temporal Parts and Identity Across Time. In: Bottani, A., Carrara, M., Giaretta, P. (eds) Individuals, Essence and Identity. Topoi Library, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1866-0_21
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