Dear all,
Just a reminder that HPS Philosophy Workshop will be on Thursday (tomorrow)
this week, at 1-2pm in Seminar Room 1 in the HPS Department. We will have a
presentation from Carlo Rossi from across the river in the Philosophy
department, discussing "Location, Multi-location, and Endurance”, followed by a
discussion. This will be of interest to anyone working in metaphysics and
philosophy of physics!
ABSRACT:
Endurance theorists have often appealed to the notions of exact location or
occupation and multi-location in order to explain how objects persist through
spacetime in the context of the Special Theory of Relativity (STR).
Specifically, endurantists invoke these two notions in order to claim that
objects persist through spacetime by exactly occupying multiple spacetime
regions, each of which is temporally unextended and disjoint from the other.
The aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding of these two notions
and of the implications they have for understanding our preferred account of
endurance. Bearing such aim in mind, in the first section of the paper I
discuss the five conditions proposed by Cody Gilmore that any account of exact
occupation must satisfy, and also the difficulties that arise for this cluster
of conditions (2006). In the next section I evaluate an Parsons' alternative
proposal, which defines exact occupation in terms of overlap (2007). In spite
of some advantages over Gilmore’s account, one noticeable shortcoming of this
account is that it does not allow enduring objects to be multi-located at
different spacetime regions. Enduring objects exactly occupy one spacetime
region, which coincides with their spatiotemporal path. Next, I explore the
possibility of a middle ground between Gilmore’s and Parsons’ account, which
might allow us to retain the advantages of Parsons’ accounts along with
multi-location. Such theory seems to be defended by Crisp and Smith (2005), but
I argue that they fail in their attempt of treating overlap as primitive and at
the same time allowing multi-location. If time allows, I will finally discuss
the prospects for some alternative ways of characterizing the endurance vs.
perdurance debate which are available for those who remain skeptics of the
intelligibility of the notion of multi-location. Crucially, these ways of
characterizing the current debate would switch its focus of the dispute from
issues about location to issues about parthood (Donnelly 2010, 2011.)
Carlo has provided some recommended readings for this talk in lieu of a paper:
A short section from the SEP:
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/location-mereology/#Mul
And an article, “Persistance and Location in Relativistic Spacetime”, by Cody
Gilmore:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00185.x/abstract
I hope to see as many people there as possible. Come for the tea and coffee,
stay for the philosophy. Or vice versa if that seems more respectable.
Best,
Toby Bryant
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