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On Stages, Worms, and Relativity*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2010

Yuri Balashov
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Abstract

Four–dimensionalism, or perdurantism, the view that temporally extended objects persist through time by having (spatio-)temporal parts or stages, includes two varieties, the worm theory and the stage theory. According to the worm theory, perduring objects are four–dimensional wholes occupying determinate regions of space–time and having temporal parts, or stages, each of them confined to a particular time. The stage theorist, however, claims, not that perduring objects have stages, but that the fundamental entities of the perdurantist ontology are stages. I argue that considerations of special relativity favor the worm theory over the stage theory.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 50 , March 2002 , pp. 223 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2002

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