A couple of days back, I was looking over entries at a great blog, new to me, [Thoughts Rants and Arguments], when I ran across the term perdurantism (here and here). I paused, and then off I went to the OED: perdure to endure, continue, or last. Little did I realize that perdurant and endurant had entered the rarified world of formal onotology. Brian had been set off on his entries by a critique of the conjunction of perdurantism and universalism in paper by Achille Varzi of Columbia. In his opening paragraph, Varzi writes:
Perdurantism is the view that objects are temporally extended. An object, on this view, has spatial as well as temporal parts, or stages, and to say of an object that it persists through time is to say that it has different parts that exist at different times. Typically (though not necessarily) this view goes hand in hand with the principles of classical extensional mereology. In particular, perdurantism is usually associated with universalism, i.e., with the thesis that any old class of things has a mereological fusion—something composed of just those things. This combination of perdurantism and universalism may strike some as absurd.
Perdure and endure go back to a passel of Latin verbs (induro, induresco, obduro, obduresco, and perduro, all pretty much meaning to endure) based on the root durus 'hard' that is cognate with tree and truth in English and drus 'tree; oak' in Greek and ultimately druid. Googling around, I found these succinct definitions of perdurant and endurant online:
In a nowadays almost mythical passage of his On the Plurality of Worlds, [David] Lewis distinguishes between two ways of persisting, i.e. existing in time, namely endurance and perdurance. A perduring object persists by having a different temporal part at each time, while an enduring object is wholly present at each instant of its existence.
[Luc Schneider. 2002. Formalised Elementary Formal Ontology, p.58]
Ah, now I know better. Some of the sample sentences in these and other papers would give Chomsky and his inquiring hoard the run-around just on literary merit, e.g., the following are from Varzi's paper:
Other words are called into the fray, e.g., in a paper by Josh Parsons with the postmodern title, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a turnip:
Perdurantism is sometimes stigmatised as the view that persisting objects are not literally identical from time to time. That criticism is a mistake. According to perdurantism, Pavarotti is a perduring space-time worm, with some temporal parts in, say, 1940, and some in 2003. Pavarotti himself exists at both these times, and never fails to be identical to himself (how could he?) It is literally the very same Pavarotti who exists in 1940 as in 2003.
If this is an example of ontology coming to grips with tense, then just imagine the fun to be had when they find out about aspect or ergativity.
Posted by jim at November 9, 2003 10:59 AM | TrackBack