How Things Persist by Katherine Hawley

How Things Persist by Katherine Hawley

How do things persist? Are material objects spread out through time just as they are spread out through space? Or is temporal persistence quite different from spatial extension? This key question lies at the heart of any metaphysical exploration of the material world, and it plays a crucial part in debates about personal identity and survival. Katherine Hawley explores and compares three theories of persistence -- endurance, perdurance, and stage theories - investigating the ways in which they attempt to account for the world around us. Having provided valuable clarification of its two main rivals, she concludes by advocating stage theory. Such a basic issue about the nature of the physical world naturally has close ties with other central philosophical problems. How Things Persist includes discussions of change and parthood, of how we refer to material objects at different times, of the doctrine of Humean supervenience, and of the modal features of material things. In particular, it contains new accounts of the nature of worldly vagueness, and of what binds material things together over time, distinguishing the career of a natural object from an arbitrary sequence of events. Each chapter concludes with a reflection about the impact of these metaphysical debates upon questions about our personal identity and survival. Both students and professional philosophers will find that this wide-ranging study provides ideal access to the lively modern debate about an ancient metaphysical problem.

How Things Persist is a careful and clever defence of stage theory.. the book is not only a worthy defence of a novel ontology, it is also an instructive survey of the metaphysics of material objects in general and the philosophy of persistence in particular. * Mind *

Katherine Hawley is Lecturer in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of St Andrews.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780199249138
ISBN 10	019924913X
Titel	How Things Persist
Autor	Katherine Hawley
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Hardback
Verlag	Oxford University Press
Erscheinungsjahr	2002-01-03
Seitenanzahl	232
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar