On Staying The Same

288 jim stone
On staying the same

Jim Stone
According to David Lewis, something ‘endures iff it persists by being

wholly present at more than one time’ (1986: 202). Lewis claims that the
‘problem of temporary intrinsics’ (PTI, henceforth) is a decisive objection
against endurance: ‘Persisting things change their intrinsic properties. For
instance shape: when I sit, I have a bent shape, when I stand, I have a
straightened shape. … How is such change possible?’ (1986: 203–204).
Robin Le Poidevin explicates the difficulty this way: ‘Among the set of past
facts is Fa; among the set of present facts is Not-Fa. So reality contains two
facts, Fa and Not-Fa, which together form a contradiction’ (1998: 38).
Lewis’s alternative is ‘Perdurantism’: ordinary material things persist by
having parts that exist at different times. Temporary intrinsics belong to
different temporal parts. Lewis is bent in the derived sense that he has a
part that is bent simpliciter; he sits and stands much as a road is both
straight and windy because it has a straight part and a windy part.
One way to defend Endurantism against PTI is to deny that shapes are
intrinsic properties. Lewis, setting out this view, writes:
[C]ontrary to what we might think, shapes … are disguised relations,
which an enduring thing may bear to times. One and the same endur-
ing thing may bear the bent-shape relation to some times, and the
straight-shape relation to others. In itself, considered apart from its
relation to other things, it has no shape at all. And likewise for all
other seeming temporary intrinsics … (1986: 204)
Lewis finds this view ‘incredible’: ‘If we know what shape is, we know that
it is a property, not a relation’ (1986: 204). Peter van Inwagen has differ-
ent intuitions, however:
And I do maintain this. To say that Descartes had the property of being
human is to say that he had that property at every time at which he
existed. To say that he had the property of being a philosopher is to
say that he had that property at every member of some important and
salient class of moments – his adult life. (1990: 250)
Analysis 63.4, October 2003, pp. 288–91. © Jim Stone
on staying the same 289
Can we do better than butt intuitions? Here is a difficulty for the

‘Relational View’ (provisionally the view that seeming intrinsics are really
relations to times).1 If Descartes is a philosopher at 21, at 22, and so on
until he dies at age 54, plainly there is a feature (G) that he has from 21 to
54 because of this fact, one he might have had for a shorter or a longer span
(e.g. he would have had it for a shorter span if he had died at 53, a longer
span if he had lived to be a philosopher at 55). This phenomenon is one an
account of properties should save. Of course Descartes carries along from
21 to 54 the feature of being a philosopher at 21, but not because he is a
philosopher from 21 to 54. Nor is G the feature of being a philosopher at
some time or other; he would have had that from 21 until 54 even if he had
abandoned philosophy at 23. Nor is G being a philosopher from 21 to 54;
for Descartes might have enjoyed G until 75 (if he had shunned Swedish
winters), and he would have had it longer because he would have kept on
doing philosophy. Nor is G being a philosopher all of his adult life; for
Descartes would have had G longer if he had also been a philosopher from
12 to 20, but he would not have had longer the feature of being a philoso-
pher all of his adult life. Nor is G the feature of being a philosopher for
many years. For the property Descartes has from 21 to 54 is one he would
have had only from 21 to 24 if he had shifted to portrait painting at 25.
A strongly counter-intuitive consequence of RV is that G does not exist.
Of course G is the property of being a philosopher simpliciter. The dif-
ficulty iterates for other temporary intrinsics, like being bent simpliciter.
Once we allow that there are such accidental properties there is no reason
to deny that there are essential intrinsic properties, like being human sim-
pliciter. Note that the difficulty also arises for relational properties like
living in India, which I had from 30 to 32. If we insist that this is really a
three-place relation, one term of which is a time, we are left without enough
relations to go around. RV is best defined as the thesis that all properties,
whether seeming intrinsics or relations, are relations to times.
In short, a difficulty for RV is that it leaves us without enough proper-
ties to ascribe one wherever a feature plainly persists. As a principal point
of ‘property talk’ is to enable us to do just that, on its face RV is a mistaken
account of properties. The defence is unpersuasive that we believe in G
because we fail to realize that ‘Descartes is a philosopher’ is an abbreviated
relational claim. It is hard to believe that we believe in G simply because
we are ‘bewitched by language’. Consequently RV cannot rescue enduring
things from the problem of temporary intrinsics.
1
The Relational View (RV) cannot plausibly exclude non-temporary ‘intrinsics’. If
your occasional hairiness is a relation to times, so is my perpetual hairiness. Also, it
is implausible that essential ‘intrinsics’ are intrinsics but accidental ones are not. If I
am always human and hairy, and the latter feature is a relation to times, so is the
former. A final definition of RV appears below.
290 jim stone
Friends of the Relational View might respond that RV is justified anyway

because the alternative, Perdurantism, is even more counter-intuitive. G
turns out to be a temporary intrinsic, all of which must be jettisoned to
keep Endurantism afloat.2 However the above discussion raises a deeper
question: given RV, is Endurantism worth saving? For consider: A
property-instantiation cannot survive the demise of the thing that has the
property. To illustrate with a perdurantist example, a temporal series of
momentary philosophers cannot ‘stay the same’ in the way that Descartes
remains a philosopher from 21 to 54. For no instantiation of the feature of
being a philosopher persists, and the series itself is a philosopher only in
the derivative sense that its parts are philosophers simpliciter. (Indeed,
Perdurantism precludes G; for the property of having a temporal part
which is a philosopher is one that Descartes would have had from 21 until
54 even if he had given up philosophy at 22. And so on …) The same thing
is true of a temporal series of momentary men; no instantiation of the prop-
erty of being a man persists. Of course we do not think that properties
merely have multiple instances; they also persist in individual things. The
most important philosophical theory that flows from this conviction is that
the form Man explains me throughout my career because its original
instantiation perpetuates itself. This requires an ontology of ordinary
things that are wholly present at different times.
What Endurantism buys us are property instantiations that persist
because the conditions for the property’s instantiation continue to arise in
the self-same thing. As the relation ‘is a man at’ (call it R) that relates
Descartes and 21 is a property of its relata, R is instantiated anew at 22,
at 23 and so on – much as, for the perdurantist, ‘Man’ is instantiated
repeatedly in the temporal parts of Descartes that exist at 21, at 22, and so
on. (Similarly if I dance with Alice, then Mary, then Sally, the relation
‘dances with’ is instantiated anew each time I change partners.) The claim
that Descartes is a man all of his life, say, is reducible to the claim that, for
some range of times t1 through tn such that Descartes does not exist before
t1 or after tn, Descartes stands in R to t1, to t2, and so on to tn. There is no
persisting instantiation of R. Given RV, therefore, an ontology of enduring
material things becomes idle. Properties, by their very nature, cannot
persist in the metaphysically interesting way that Endurantism is meant to
2
Presentists believe they can save Endurantism by denying there are past facts. The
present fact that I am straight is consistent with the present fact that I was bent. I do
not think Presentism is viable (nor does Lewis), but I cannot go into that here. As I
wish to show that RV fails as a defence of Endurantism even if there is no other
defence, suppose for argument’s sake that we must choose between Perdurantism and
RV.
on staying the same 291
secure.3 As material change is a reason independent of PTI to deny that

ordinary things are wholly present at different times (‘One cannot step in
the same river twice, for the water is always new’), Endurantism remains
embattled even if RV is accepted. We are left with an idle and problematic
ontology.
By contrast, a series of momentary men avoids both the problem of
material change and PTI, and it is not meant to bear persisting instantia-
tions of properties which, it turns out, cannot exist if it does. Indeed, such
a series is consistent with the existence of intrinsic properties – an advan-
tage, for we can accept a simpler and more intuitive account of properties
than RV. In short, if Descartes is a philosopher at 21, at 22 and so on until
54, but there is no feature G, the reasonable conclusion is that he is made
of temporal parts.4
The University of New Orleans

New Orleans, LA 70148, USA
jstone@uno.edu
References
Le Poidevin, R., ed. 1998. Questions of Time and Tense. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lewis, D. 1986. On The Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell.
van Inwagen, P. 1990. Four-dimensional objects. Nous: 245–55.
3
The endurantist might claim that Endurantism buys us something else which RV does
not compromise. (If so, this paper’s point is that, given RV, Endurantism is less worth
saving.) The objection lacks force unless she produces that ‘something else’. It cannot
be that Endurantism better satisfies our intuitions about how ordinary things persist;
RV’s conjunction with Endurantism is quite counter-intuitive.
4
The presentist (see n. 2, above) would say that there is presently a feature G that
Descartes had from 21 through 54 because he was a philosopher from 21 through
54, which he could have had for a longer or a shorter span. If there is no G, there-
fore, Presentism is false and cannot serve as an alternative to Perdurantism. Thanks
to Berit Brogaard and Judith Crane for helpful comments and discussions.

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288 jim stone

On staying the same

According to David Lewis, something ‘endures iff it persists by being

Can we do better than butt intuitions? Here is a difficulty for the

Friends of the Relational View might respond that RV is justified anyway

secure.3 As material change is a reason independent of PTI to deny that

The University of New Orleans

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