Fragmentalist Presentist Perdurantism

Perdurantists think of continuants as mereological sums of stages (that is, sums of instantaneous spatiotemporal parts) from different times. This view of persistence would force us to drop the idea that there is genuine change in the world. By exploiting a presentist metaphysics, Brogaard (The Monist, 83, 341–354 2000) proposed a theory, called presentist four-dimensionalism, that aims to reconcile perdurantism with the idea that things undergo real change. However, her proposal commits us to reject the idea that stages must exist in their entirety. Giving up the tenet that all the stages are equally real could be a price that perdurantists are unwilling to pay. I argue that Kit Fine (2005)’s fragmentalism provides us with the tools to combine a presentist metaphysics with a perdurantist theory of persistence without giving up the idea that reality is constituted by more than purely present stages.