Abstract

Four-dimensionalism is the view that material objects have temporal as well as spatial parts, and perdure by being temporally extended. Most who defend this ontology of perduring objects think that temporal parts are needed for an adequate account of how objects survive the changes they undergo. On their view, objects perdure through time by possessing different temporal parts with incompatible properties. But some critics have charged that genuine change is impossible on the temporal parts ontology of material objects. I argue that temporal parts theorists can meet the “no-change” objection by placing some causal restrictions among temporal parts