Persons do not possess temporal parts.

Thankyou very much to Vi_Veri for her last round. Con has essentially two points to make: 1) The special relativity argument for temporal parts. 2) The refutation of the "too many thinkers" argument. I'll tackle each in succession: 1) I agree that a endurantist is - or should be - committed to presentism. What I disagree with is Con's claim that presentism and STR are incompatible. Con's argument boiled down is, basically there is no such thing as "absolute time" as presentists assume (per STR) and since the "present" can only be relatively distinguished there is no reason for the special metaphysical privileging of the present moment which in case spells trouble for the endurantist who holds to presentism. I imagine that Con would take to this statement well: If one takes the science of STR seriously (and they should) and presentism truly conflicts with STR then so much the worse presentism. I aim to show how they are not incompatible and science, STR, gives us no reason to favor a theory of time that is compatible with perdurantism than over a theory of time that is compatible with endurantism. 2) Since the spatial parts analogies are particularly unmotivated we can now examine Con's alleged refutation of the "too many thinkers" argument. Con's argument is basically that when my temporal parts say "I" that denotes the person, me, as a whole; when I, PCP, say "I" am referring to myself. When a temporal part of me says "I" it's referring to the person it is a part of is what Con seems to advocating. Following this line of reasoning, therefore, if "I" both refer to same subject the "problem" with too many thinkers evaporates. The problem with this is this raises several very difficult issues. What exactly is the word "I" supposed mean on a perdurantist account of persons? This seems like a linguistic trick - on the normal account the word "I" just refers to a subject when it is thinking about itself using first-personal terms. It's obvious my present temporal part as a first-person point of view because I, PCP, have a first-person point of view at present in virtue of PCP-present having that first-person point of view. If a temporal parts metaphysician denies the preceding sentence the jig is up because that is what a perdurantist is committed to. It's a self-referential word. With that in mind its not easy to to see why a PCP-present cannot be referring to itself when it thinks "I am hungry". As Jim Stone has aptly pointed out - word "I" plausibly just means "the thinker of this very thought". [1] If it doesn't it's hard to even make sense out of the claim that the word "I" doesn't mean that. If it doesn't does not the word "I' lose any sense of coherent reference? It makes no sense to have a something else do your first-personal thinking for you where "I" doesn't refer to itself. If that is the case then when PCP-present thinks "I am hungry" it is not referring to PCP - because, remember, I am an aggregate of temporal parts - it is referring to itself. This still leads us to major problems when we see that PCP-present can still think "I am a person" and it be false while I can think I am a person and it would be true. How can it be that "I" refers to two different thinkers when one is just a temporal part of the other? And this highlights what is the problem with the "too many grabbers" argument. I suppose the analogy is suppose to be like just as the muscle of the hand are constitutive (i.e. they make up) the hand temporal parts are constitutive of the person. So just as when the muscles grab the cup of water the hand grabs the cup of water,similarly, when the temporal part(s) think "I am a person" the person also thinks "I am a person". The problem is all the muscles (including bones, I suppose) of a hand just are the hand. We are talking about an individual temporal part thinking something that is not true for itself but true for the person it is a part of. To make the analogy resemble the "too many thinkers" argument you'd have have a smaller amount of muscles then what constitutes the hand and the hand grabbing the cup of water. But if you show that then that is obviously just as an absurd conclusion as the conclusion of the "too many thinkers" argument. ========== Sources ========== [1] http://philpapers.org...