Four-dimensionalism

This article is about the metaphysical doctrine. For four-dimensional space, see Four-dimensional space.

In philosophy, four-dimensionalism (sometimes called the doctrine of temporal parts) is a family of views about the ontology of time and persistence. Roughly, four-dimensionalists hold that persisting objects are extended in time in a way analogous to their extension in space, and that they are composed of distinct temporal parts located at different times, in addition to their spatial parts.

The label four-dimensionalism is used in more than one way in the literature. In a narrow sense it refers to theories of persistence—most prominently perdurantism and the closely related stage theory or exdurantism—according to which ordinary objects persist by having temporal parts. In a broader sense, the term is sometimes used for any view on which past, present and future times—and the objects located at them—are all equally real, in opposition to presentism. On this usage, "four-dimensionalism" functions as a label for non-presentist eternalist views of time rather than for a specific account of persistence.

Four-dimensionalist views play a central role in contemporary debates about identity over time, the nature of temporal reality and the interpretation of modern physics. They are typically contrasted with three-dimensionalism or endurantism, according to which persisting objects are wholly present at each time at which they exist and do not have temporal parts.

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