Metaphysics Work-in-Progress Group (Tuesday - Week 8, MT20)

Certain views about the nature of experience make trouble for standard four-dimensionalist theories of persistence, at least against the background of certain plausible assumptions about composition.  Specifically, if experience takes time and cannot be (in Peter van Inwagen’s phrase) a “disguised cooperative activity,” then perdurantism and stage theory are in a tight spot.  For both theories (at least in their standard forms) are committed to capturing all qualitative facts by appeal to the properties and relations of stages.  After laying out the problem (and some four-dimensionalist strategies of response), I begin sketching a view that might do better, the view that subjects of experience (at least) are temporally extended simples that endure by “traveling” forward in time.

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