Persistence Over Time
Common-sense tells us that objects persist across time, that there is some sense in which you are the same person you were yesterday, in which the oak is the same as the acorn, in which you perhaps even can step into the same river twice. Philosophers have developed two rival theories for how this happens, called endurantism and perdurantism. Broadly speaking, endurantists hold that a whole object exists at each moment of its history, and the same object exists at each moment, while perdurantists believe that objects are 4-dimensional entities made up of a series of temporal parts like the frames of a movie.
Read more about this topic: Identity And Change
Famous quotes containing the words persistence and/or time:
“Extreme patience and persistence are required,
Yet everybody succeeds at this before being handed
The surprise box lunch of the rest of his life.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“It is at the same time by poetry and through poetry, by and through music, that the soul glimpses the splendors found behind the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to one’s eyes, these tears are not the sign of excessive pleasure, they are rather witness to an irritated melancholy, to a condition of nerves, to a nature exiled to imperfection and which would like to seize immediately, on this very earth, a revealed paradise.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)