Not all worlds are stages

Abstract

The stage theory is a four-dimensional account of persistence motivated by the worm theory's inability to account for our intuitions in the cases involving coinciding objects. Like the worm theory, it claims that there are objects spread out in time, but unlike the worm theory, it argues that these spacetime worms are not familiar particulars like tables and chairs. Rather, familiar particulars are the instantaneous temporal slices of worms. In order to explain our intuitions that particulars persist for more than an instant, the stage theory draws on the counterpart theory of modal possibilism, which it is supposed to parallel. In this paper I show how the stage theory presupposes that time can be divided into instants, which I call the atomistic view of time. I do this by laying out an alternative theory of the nature of time, the gunky view, and show that if time is gunky the stage theory collapses into the worm theory. The deeper problem is that the mere possibility of gunky time would cause the stage theory's parallels to possibilism to break down. I therefore conclude that the stage theory is committed to the view that time is necessarily atomistic. Finally, in the last section I argue that the fact that the stage theory rules out a priori the possibility of time being gunky gives us reason to reject it as an account of persistence. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers.