Is it possible for objects genuinely to persist yet change their intrinsic, natural properties?
Many accounts support the possibility for objects genuinely to persist yet change their intrinsic, natural properties. Intuitively we think that it would be possible: the assumption that this claim is true, Loux argues, ‘underlies some of our most fundamental beliefs about ourselves and the world around us’ (1998: 203). In this essay I shall focus solely on the account of David Lewis’s ‘Doctrine of Temporal Parts’ that it is possible for objects to persist through change by having different temporal parts. By briefly examining intrinsics and extrinsics and the problem of change you will be able to see how successful Lewis’s solution is to this problem, before viewing some weaknesses of the account and then ultimately concluding that Lewis solution successfully achieves the possibility that objects genuinely persist yet change their intrinsic, natural properties.
Intrinsics vs. Extrinsics
Persists: something persists iff the object exists at more than one time: to transcend momentary. Persistence through time is analogous to an extension through space. There is much debate over how objects are composed, and what is regarded as an intrinsic property. What one counts as an intrinsic property will be integral to their criterion of persisting identity for objects that is predicated on the object’s having certain intrinsic properties. The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties is essential, and within this argument; we shall use Lewis’s definitions. Extrinsic properties are ones that an object has in virtue of the relations it stands to different things, e.g. location, temperature. While “A thing has its intrinsic properti...
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...wo side by side the endurantist theories, and our intuition, never better Lewis’s third solution of the doctrine of temporal parts. The endurantist solutions are all far more weak and primitive than Lewis’s. Lewis deems the endurantist position as metaphysically untenable and his own as philosophically sound because of his side note of the need to accept temporal parts into the reader’s ontology.
Conclusion
This essay argues it is possible for objects genuinely to persist, yet change their intrinsic properties. Lewis’s stance of the ‘doctrine of temporal parts’ as an argument for persistence, by perduring, requires us to reduce the authority we give to our intuition in influencing our philosophical view. If one accepts the trade-off, then Lewis’s solution allows for the possibility for objects genuinely to persist yet change their intrinsic, natural properties.
In this paper, I offer a reconstruction of Aristotle’s argument from Physics Book 2, chapter 8, 199a9. Aristotle in this chapter tries to make an analogy between nature and action to establish that both, nature and action, have an end.
... middle of paper ... ... Everything is basically relative and is what each separate person perceives it to be, just like the answers to the infinite questions posed by The Turn of the Screw. Works Cited Burrows, Stuart.
Among these components and powers there is no generation and demolition—henceforth, no change. The measure of, say, earth on the planet stays consistent, and earth never shows signs of change subjectively. Each of the four elements and the two motive forces, then, are Parmenidean Reals. Be that as it may, there is likewise, on this view, the lower level of reality. The world of tactile experience, the world we observe and hear around us, has a place with this level of reality. This world comes to fruition as an aftereffect of the blending and isolating of the four components as indicated by the strengths of adoration and strife. Despite the fact that there is change, generation, and pulverization in this world, it is not an infringement of the Eleatic requests, Empedocles accepted, on the grounds that these progressions were not occurring on the level of the most genuine things. Empedocles explained how the different mixtures of his elements gave to different substances. He even how differing mixtures can sometimes yield different degrees of the exact same type of substance. For example, the elemental recipe for blood could be varied to create different types of blood, which as a result, would correspond to produce different levels of intelligence in the blood’s
“Let us take, for instance, this piece of wax. It has been taken quite recently from the honeycomb; it has not yet lost all the honey flavor. It retains some of the scent of the flowers from which it was collected. Its color, shape, and size are manifest. It is hard and cold; it is easy to touch. If you rap on it with your knuckle it will emit a sound” (Descartes, 21)
Accepting that we cannot establish the "objectivity" of our experiences' content, Kant nevertheless attempts to resist a slide into relativism by insisting that they are mediated by rationally delineated categories which supposedly insure the transcendental or universal nature of their form, thereby providing an absolute standard against which we might check the veridicality of our descriptions of, and communications concerning, them. However as a priori preconditions of the possibility of experience such categories are obviously inexperienceable in themselves, and consequently must also fall to the phenomenological reduction. (3) Nevertheless, a moments reflection will confirm that our experiences do indeed exhibit structure or form, and that we are able, even from within, or wholly upon the basis of, the (phenomenologically reduced) realm of, our experiences per se, to distinguish between the flux of constantly changing and interrupted subjective appearances, and the relatively unchanging and continuously existing objects constituted therein. Husserl confirms:
The 'doctrine of recollection' states that all true knowledge exists implicitly within us, and can be brought to consciousness - made explicit - by recollection. Using the Platonic concepts of 'Forms', 'particulars', 'knowledge' and 'true opinion', this essay explains what can or cannot be recollected, why all knowledge is based on recollection, and why the doctrine does not prove the soul to be immortal.
...ok an old broken table, fixed it, polished it, and painted it to the point that the old table is unrecognizable. The original object is still there, it has just been transformed so much that you can’t say it is still as it was.
Smith, Q., & Oaklander, L. N. (1995).Time, change, and freedom an introduction to metaphysics. London: Routledge.
Book XII of the Metaphysics opens with a clear statement of its goal in the first line of Chapter One: to explore substances as well as their causes and principles. With this idea in mind, Chapter One delineates the three different kinds of substances: eternal, sensible substances; perishable, sensible substances; and immovable substances. The sensible substances are in the realm of natural sci...
. Its most famous defender is Descartes, who argues that as a subject of conscious thought and experience, he cannot consist simply of spatially extended matter. His essential nature must be non-m...
Wilkes, Kathleen. The Systematic Elusiveness of ' I '. The Philosophers' Magazine 12, Autumn 2000. pp. 46-47.
In his Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes seeks to prove that corporeal objects exist. This argument is put forth based on the principles and supposed facts he has built up throughout the Meditations. In order to fully understand his argument for the existence of corporeal things, one must trace his earlier arguments for effects and their causes, the existence of God, the nature of God, and his ability to never make mistakes.
...of the body, and no problem arises of how soul and body can be united into a substantial whole: ‘there is no need to investigate whether the soul and the body are one, any more than the wax and the shape, or in general the matter of each thing and that of which it is the matter; for while “one” and “being” are said in many ways, the primary [sense] is actuality’ (De anima 2.1, 12B6–9).Many twentieth-century philosophers have been looking for just such a via media between materialism and dualism, at least for the case of the human mind; and much scholarly attention has gone into asking whether Aristotle’s view can be aligned with one of the modern alternatives, or whether it offers something preferable to any of the modern alternatives, or whether it is so bound up with a falsified Aristotelian science that it must regretfully be dismissed as no longer a live option.
Within the realm of philosophy, how creatures operate is a mystery that craves to be solved. Within Paul Churchland’s “Matter and Consciousness”, materialism, functionalism, and eliminative materialism attempt to explain such mystery.
However, Berkeley’s idealism had its consequences. Objects did not persist for very long. Every time our perception of an object is interrupted, that object goes out of existence and is replaced by a duplicate when we observe it again.