Granting Time Its Passage :: Endurantism Philosophy Papers

Granting Time Its Passage Many philosophers who support a four-dimensionalist metaphysics of things also conceive of experience as a state of a mind having temporal extension or existing as a momentary feature of the dimension of time. This essay shows that such a strict four-dimensionalism — suggested in works by D. M. Armstrong, Mark Heller, and David Lewis — cannot be correct, since it cannot allow for the passing of time that is essential to awareness. The argument demonstrates that the positing of any temporal process at all must compromise the strict four-dimensionalist view of the temporality of experience. This is not to say that the traditional endurantist view is left wholeheartedly endorsed. As I point out, this traditional view makes several questionable claims of its own that must be carefully scrutinized. Still, the criticism of the strict four-dimensionalist ontology indicates a direction to be followed in developing a successful metaphysics of experience. This essay presents a critique of what I call strict four-dimensionalism, a metaphysical view supported by David Armstrong, Mark Heller, and David Lewis.(1) Strict four-dimensionalism includes "things experiential" in the group of things that are temporal only insofar as they either have temporal extension or exist at some point upon the axis of time. I argue that experience cannot exist in this way. Its temporality must be of a different order. For experience must involve the passing of time,(2) and this is something that strict four-dimensionalism must exclude. This does not, however, disprove that ontology in toto. It does not venture beyond the theme of experience's temporal nature. What is at stake here is simply the securing of experience's temporality from a misleading metaphysical interpretation. The issue is simply the metaphysics of the seemingly non-thing-like entity of temporal experience. Four-dimensionalism maintains that, strictly speaking, physical objects existing for more than an instant so exist only by being extended along the axis of time, just as common objects existing at more than one point in space exist in this way only by being extended along the three spatial axes.(3) As Lewis puts it: "Enduring things are timelike streaks" laid out across the fourth dimension, "wholes composed of temporal parts, or stages, located at various times and places" (Lewis 1976, 145). For a thing that lasts from one time to another, say from t1 to t2, it is thus not the case that the same thing once existing entirely at t1 exists later entirely at t2.