Читать книгу What is Metaphysics? - John Heil - Страница 19

Some philosophers think of spatial and temporal parts as parts of the occupants of space and time. On such a conception, your head and left hand are distinct spatial parts of you. What of your temporal parts? If these were parts of you analogous to your head and hand, you – all of you – would never be anywhere at any given time. The you here now is simply a slender piece of you. Many philosophers reject temporal parts thus conceived.

I prefer to think of spatial and temporal parts differently. Your head and hand are not spatial parts of you, but parts of you that occupy particular regions of space. If you sit down and raise your hand, your head and hand swap their locations. Similarly, a temporal part of you is not a piece of you, but you at any given time.

This way of thinking about spatial and temporal parts can escape notice because we often use locations in space and time to refer to their occupants. When you slice a tomato in half and give me the top half, you are giving me a portion of the tomato that once occupied a spatial region above another spatial region occupied by the bottom half of the tomato.

Analogously, a temporal part of you is not one of a number of parts that make up you; it is you – the whole of you – at any given time.