Volume V (2022) (2015)
during the time between t 1 and t 2 . It can also be assumed that Tim at t 2 has faced a series of
illnesses and possibly a major accident that has changed his body and, subsequently, his first-
person perspective. Do the changes he undergoes in his first-person perspective – his identity – make him a different person? One can either consider Tim at t 1 and t 2 as two different persons or
argue that Tim is the same person.
The first option, considering them as two different persons leads to significant challenges. If
a change in time causes personal identity and personhood to change, then a human being can be
infinite persons in one lifetime as time can be indefinitely reduced. In other words, Tim, one
second earlier, is different from Tim now, and they are different from Tim one second later. This
option leads to an infinite regress. Therefore, it is reasonable to neglect the first option. The second option, considering Tim at t 1 and t 2 to be the same person — having the same
first-person perspective — is not reasonable under the identity condition because of the changing
nature of the first-person perspective. However, there must be a reason why identity persists
throughout time to counteract the illogical consequences in both these options. This paper argues
that both these problems are solved if personal identity is considered a perduring entity rather than
an enduring entity.
Perdurance is a concept that suggests that entities such as animals, boats, and planets, have
temporal parts in addition to their spatial parts, i.e., an entity is made up of time-slices of its components. 19 All objects are considered to be elongated in time, i.e., objects are a fusion of all the instantaneous/continuous time slices compiled and blended into a complete mereological whole. 20
For example, consider an apple when it is unripe (greenish), ripe (red), and rotten (brown). One
would consider the apple to be the same apple even though it undergoes drastic changes in its
properties. How can it be the same apple even if its properties and parts are completely different?
Perdurance theory would state that the unripe, ripe, and rotten apple are temporal parts of the
Apple, and the entity Apple is not fully present in a given moment. See figure 1. for a graphical
illustration of this theory - in the figure O 1 O 2 O 3 O 4 O 5 represent temporal parts of ordinary objects
while t 1 t 2 t 3 t 4 t 5 represents different times.
19 Katherine Hawley, “Temporal Parts,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford University, October 5, 2015), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/temporal-parts.
20 This paper will not go into where entities are sliced in either instantaneous or continuous time slices. However, it appears that the idea of identity elongation is more coherent if time slices are taken to be continuous.
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