Abstract
The paper defends a combination of perdurantism with
mereological universalism by developing semantics of temporary predications
of the sort ’some P is/was/will be (a) Q’. We argue that, in addition to
the usual application of causal and other restrictions on sortals, the grammatical
form of such statements allows for rather different regimentations
along three separate dimensions, according to: (a) whether ‘P’ and ‘Q’ are
being used as phase or substance sortal terms, (b) whether ‘is’, ‘was’, and
‘will be’ are the ‘is’, ‘was’, ‘will be’ of identity or of constitution, and (c)
whether ‘Q’ is being used as a subject or predicate term. We conclude that
this latitude is beneficial, as it conforms with linguistic reality (i.e., the
multiple uses actually in place) and also enables one to turn what is ordinarily
perceived as a problem for universalist perdurantism viz., a commitment
to all sorts of weird and gerrymandered temporally extended
entities, into an advantage, for the richness in questions allows us to make
sense of