Building Enduring Objects Out of Spacetime

Abstract

Endurantism, the view that material objects are wholly present at each moment of their careers, is under threat from supersubstantivalism, the view that material objects are identical to spacetime regions. I discuss three compromise positions. They are alike in that they all take material objects to be composed of spacetime points or regions without being identical to any such point or region. They differ in whether they permit multilocation and in whether they postulate mereologically coincident entities. 1.If one embraces coinciding entities and rejects Strong Supplementation, one can say that material objects lack temporal parts even though they coincide with temporally extended regions that have temporal parts. One can get this far while confining oneself to the perdurantist’s simple fundamental ideology – a two-place predicate for parthood simpliciter.2.If one invokes a more exotic piece of fundamental ideology (a more-than-two-place predicate for a ‘location-relative’ parthood relation), and if one still embraces coinciding objects and rejects Strong Supplementation, then one can say that material objects both lack temporal parts, in the manner of ‘mereological endurantism’, and are multilocated in spacetime, in the manner of ‘locational endurantism’. However, nearly all B-theoretic endurantists already help themselves to a fundamental relativized parthood predicate, even in the context of dualist substantivalism.3.If one is willing to eliminate complex spacetime regions (in favor of sets or pluralities of points) and treat the fundamental parthood predicate as being both location-relative and non-distributive, one can reject temporal parts, retain locational endurantism, and avoid coinciding entities.