Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

Extensionalism is, roughly, the view that perception occurs in episodes that are temporally extended (and thus capable of accomodating in their entirety phenomena taking a nonzero lapse of time to occur). This view is widely acknowledged to be incompatible with thin presentism, the second most popular position in temporal ontology. In this paper, I argue that extensionalism is also incompatible with several other positions in temporal ontology, namely those positing the existence of non-present times that host sentience—positions I collectively refer to as the sentient non-present view. Most notably, extensionalism…

Evans claims that a sentence should always be considered correct or incorrect at the time of its utterance, to preserve what is called the “stability principle”. To introduce the debate, I refer to some remarks by Kamangar and Perry, who show how Frege could have treated future contingents in a way that would contrast Evans’ claim. I then discuss the more traditional contrast between Frege and Prior on different conceptions of propositions that lies at the core of Evans’ view, and I show how Dummett seems to find a compromise…

The persistence of social groups through change is a matter of debate in social ontology. While mereological approaches contend that social groups persist if formed by the same members, other accounts leaning towards structuralism find that what ensures the persistence of social groups is instead continuity of structure. The aim of this paper is to challenge the idea that a structuralist account is bound to hold that continuity of structure is necessary and sufficient condition for persistence. First, I consider membership changes. I argue that for structure-based metaphysics, not all…