Abstract

The problem of how a concrete individual survives changes of its properties has long divided the philosophical community into ‘enduratists’ and ‘perduratists’. Enduratists take the idea of a surviving individual ontologi-cally seriously. They claim that many objects we encounter in our every-day (and for that matter also scientific) life endure in time, which means that these entities are wholly present at any time at which they exist. For those who are in principle happy with the conceptual framework of our ‘everyday’ or ‘folk’ ontology it is common to assume that such things as human beings, animals, and plants are endurants in this sense, and the most famous articulation of this view is to be found in Aristotle’s concept of substance. Enduring entities are to be contrasted with perdurants, such as a life of a human being or a process of growing of a plant. Think of the process of writing this very paper. The beginning of the writing, the actual phase of it and the final completion of the paper are not points at which the process of writing could be wholly present. Rather they constitute phases or parts of the process in question. This means that perduring entities have a temporal dimension whereas enduring ones do not. Most of us are prepared to accept that in the world around us there are many entities of this kind, but perdu-ratists try to defend a far stronger thesis. They claim that in fact there are only perdurants. In our everyday language it is equally common to speak of enduring objects and enduring states. But it was the first idiom which mainly attracted philosophers’ attention. Yet in this paper I want to concentrate on the sec-ond figure of speech. I will investigate, whether it is ontologically legiti-mate to distinguish between enduratist and perduratist perspectives with respect to states.