The Christian Vanguard

We often talk about possibilities or the way the world would have been. For example, I could be home sleeping in right now, or I could be a sailor in Hawaii. There are endless ways to talk about the way the world could have been, and these worlds actually exist. Under modal realism, any way the world could have been actually is. There are countless other worlds that are temporally-spatio isolated from us and from each other. They don’t overlap. They have no parts in common (except, maybe, universals). There is no causal connection. They exist truly and literally just as you are real and existing. There is no difference in the way they exist. They aren’t just real in our imagination, like in some abstract platonic heaven, but real and concrete. They exist simpliciter, or without qualification. Modal realism is serviceable in that we can quantify modal claims. So if I were to claim, “It is possible that I was President of the United States” we would ask how we make sense of that c...

The problem of temporary intrinsics is that for persisting things, they change their intrinsic properties, such as shape. When I sit, I have a bent shape and when I stand I have changed my shape to a straight shape. This is distinguished from it's relations such as weight and height. For example, being the heaviest person in the room (weight) is not an intrinsic property because a heavier man may enter the room and I am no longer the heaviest man, even though nothing intrinsic about me has changed. So the problem is to explain how this change in intrinsics is possible. Lewis’ solution to this problem is to say that things perdure , not endure. Under perdurance, I have temporal parts, and intrinsics would be properties of that particular temporal part, and obviously these parts differ from one another, so it is no mystery how a thing could change its intrinsics properties. So for example, a road perdures, that is, it has different parts at different times, but doesn’t endure i...

Something persists iff it exists at various times. There are two ways something can persist: by enduring or perduring. Something endures iff it persists by being wholly present at more than one time. Something perdures iff it persists by having different temporal parts or stages at different times, though no one part of it is wholly present at more than one time, also known as 4 Dimensionalism.