Criteria of Identity and Two Modes of Persistence

Abstrakt

The purpose of this paper is, first, to present an alternative account of persistence of objects in time, as opposed to the dominant ones in the current philosophical literature, and second, to spell out an alternative role for criteria of identity. According to the proposed account, persistence is not ontologically homogeneous in nature and can be reconstructed two-sidedly either in terms of being fully present and identity, or by means of the notion of genidentity. In the latter case, objects persisting in time are described as invariants with respect to equivalence classes over certain occurrents under suitable relations of genidentity, that is, under a family of spatiotemporal and causal relations among timeslices of constitutive parts of those objects. The diversification of persistence coincides with the traditional dichotomous division of entities into entia per se and entia per aliud. There are also good reasons to be sceptical about the approach which regards criteria of identity as semantic-cum-metaphysical principles providing, in an informative and non-circular way, an ontological basis for statements about identity (i.e. as principles specifying truth-conditions of those statements). On the alternative account proposed in the paper, those criteria are regarded either as purely evidential (and individuational) or as criteria of genidentity in the metaphysical sense.