“Fourdimensionalism and Personal Identity: A Model for Persistence of Persons”
Four-dimensional theories can be taxonomized into perdurantist and exdurantist theories. On the one hand, perdurantism, holds that objects persist through time in virtue of having temporal parts at different times but never the same temporal part in more than one time. On the other, exdurantism, maintain that objects persist through time in virtue of having temporary counterparts at different times. I want to focus on exdurantism. According to exdurantism ordinary objects are instant temporal stages.
In exdurantism, we need to provide a characterization of the relation that holds between instant temporal stages; that is, a characterization of temporary counterparts. Intuitively, individual persons persist in a diferent “special” way than other kind of objects. So, the problem of answering to the question about the persistence of persons turns into providing an account of the special relation of counterpart for the case of persons.
For this purpose in this paper I argue that this “special relation” must include a psychological touch and defend that the counterpart relation for personal identity must be defined in terms of: 1) psychological continuity; 2) psychological similarity and 3) causal relations.