To Be Is To Persist

Dustin Gray finds out that continuing to exist isn’t as simple as you might think.

What does it mean for an object to persist through time? Consider the statement, ‘My car is filthy, I need to wash it.’ Consider the response, ‘How did it get that way?’ The answer is that dirt, dust and other particles have collected on the car’s surface thus making it filthy. Its properties have changed. At one point in the car’s career, none of that dirt and grime existed on its surface and the car was said to be clean. The fact is that for a car to get dirty, the extension of time is necessary. The standard view of identity is that each thing is entirely itself at any given time. So how can an object remain identical with itself over time, if it changes its properties? In many ways I have different properties now than those I had last week. But if I am different, how then can I be the same?

The objective of this article is to answer the question of what it means to say that we and other things persist through time. First I’ll lay out two popular philosophical views of persistence through time, then I will present possible problems with both views. After that, I will outline another possible answer that lies outside of these views. Finally, I will provide my own answer.

Endurance & Perdurance

Before unwrapping the popular views, let me introduce two key terms, the first of which is concrete particular. A concrete particular is an entity which comes into existence at a certain time, passes out of existence at some later time, and exists at all the times in between. Its career is ‘temporally bounded’. Examples include human beings, animals, plants, chairs, and hamburgers – as opposed, for instance, to abstract ideas, such as 1+1=2. A concrete particular is what we usually mean by a ‘thing’ or ‘object’.