Abstract

According to a recent argument due to Wasserman, endurantism does not qualify as an explanatory theory of persistence inasmuch as it either provides a circular account of persistence facts or merely rejects the perdurantist’s explanation of such facts. This paper challenges Wasserman’s conclusions by pointing out that an endurantist answer to his complaint is available thanks to the locational notions of persistence provided in the work of Gilmore, Parsons, Balashov among others. It then gives details as to how such notions can be used to answer Wasserman’s specific argument for the idea that endurantism is either unexplanatory or circular. After a brief introduction (Sect. 1 ) we provide the technical notions that we need to answer Wasserman’s complaint (Sect. 2 ) and offer a phrasing of endurantism which is immune to that complaint in terms of locative notions (Sect. 3 ). We then prove that two further conceptions of endurantism are entailed by that phrasing. Crucially, such conceptions are phrased in terms that Wasserman himself cannot, on pain of inconsistency, dismiss, as those are the very terms in which he conceives of endurantism in the first place—that is, whole presence and the rejection of temporal parts (Sect. 4 ).