Causation, Identity, and Nature of Temporal Parts

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My research project will use causation to formulate a new theory of the connections between temporal parts. This will address three significant research questions: What are temporal parts? How are temporal parts connected? Can we use this connection to answer other issues associated with temporal parts, such as their compatibility with presentism and 'fuzzy boundaries'? Popularised by Lewis (1976; 1986), temporal parts are commonly employed in metaphysics to account for how objects can survive changes through time. The view that objects are both spatially and temporally extended (have spatial and temporal parts) is known as perdurantism. Perdurantists treat spatial and temporal parts as analogous, but challengers to this view question how temporal parts connect to one another and to the whole objects to which they belong (Lowe, 1998; Tallant, 2018). I seek to develop an account of the connection between temporal parts by building upon the identity relation developed by Lewis (1976). When discussing a time traveller, Lewis argues that what ties the temporal parts of a person to one another is an appropriate level of mental continuity and connectedness between them. Lewis argues that this continuity and connectedness of an entity are not merely accidental, rather they are explicable in terms of causation. For the properties of one temporal part causally depends on those temporal parts that sit before. It is this notion of causation as the tie between temporal parts that I wish to provide a full account of. Whilst Lewis uses this to understand the notion of a four-dimensional time traveller, the upshot of this theory has not been sufficiently explored. I propose an account of temporal parts which distinguishes their connectedness from the connectedness between spatial parts. This distinction will separate my project from other works that have sought to use causation to help bind temporal parts, such as Hawley (2001) and Armstrong (1997). Whilst these theories employ causation in a similar way to my proposed solution, they do not focus on divorcing our understanding of temporal parts from our understanding of spatial parts. This distinction, I argue, gives my theory the ability to respond better to objections raised to the general causal approach. Further, whilst there has been significant discussion around objections raised to temporal parts and their solution to the problems of change (Hawley, 2020), the debate does not focus on the connection between successive temporal parts. My proposed project will help to address this significant research lacuna.I seek to achieve this novel understanding of temporal parts by dedicating a year to each of my key research questions. I will dedicate my first year of research to reviewing the literature on accounts of temporal parts. This will ultimately answer the question of "what are temporal parts?", thus embedding my work into the existing literature and ensure that my solutions are at the forefront of the current discussion. In my second year, I shall develop my own account of temporal parts as connected through causation by developing Lewis' identity relation, with reference to the literature on modality and counterfactual causation. This will answer the question "how are temporal parts connected?" by providing a new account of causation as the bind between temporal parts. My third year will be devoted to evaluating my account. I will demonstrate how we can use this causal connection to answer other issues associated with temporal parts, thus answering my final research question. I will demonstrate how understanding the connection between temporal parts as causal provides solutions to two significant problems. The first problem concerns the apparent 'fuzzy' boundaries that an object with temporal parts will have. The second concerns temporal parts and their relation to the distinct debate of temporal ontology.