According to one theory of persistence, objects persist through change over time in virtue of being wholly present at all points in time at which they exist. According to another theory, objects are spacetime worms that persist in virtue of having temporal parts at all points at which they exist. According to a third theory, objects, strictly speaking, are momentary time slices, and ordinary medium-sized dry goods are sums of time slices related by a temporal counterpart relation. Whole object theory, parthood theory, and counterpart theory are theories of extension (in time, in this case, but they can also be applied to ordinary space and modal space). These theories are distinct from three-dimensionalism and four-dimensionalism, which do not explain how objects are extended in a domain, but rather the number and kind of dimensions an object’s extension occupies. Each theory of extension is consistent with exactly one of 3Dism and 4Dism, and 4Dism is vastly more plausible than 3Dism independent of any considerations of persistence and extension. Therefore it remains to weigh those theories of extension consistent with 4Dism against one another. Slice theory comes with an ontological price that worm theory is free of: Slice theory rises or falls with an orthogonal metaphysical principle, i.e. unrestricted mereological composition, whereas worm theory is on equally good footing given restricted or unrestricted composition. On the other hand, worm theory bears a semantic price that slice theory avoids: Worm theory is in a difficult position vis-a-vis the semantics of counting and the problem of coincidence. The author argues that worm theory can survive its semantic cost but slice theory cannot survive its ontological costs.

In this paper Day argues that there are particular actions that will always have an imperceptible effect when performed individually, but that when these actions are performed by a large number of people the collective effects can be perceptibly large. Thus, the act-utilitarian may find herself in a situation relevantly similar to a prisoner’s dilemma; as such, act-utilitarianism is directly collectively selfdefeating. The paper then discusses the practical implications of this problem, such as in the case of the dilemma of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, where imperceptible individual actions sum into perceptible effects. Day concludes by arguing that if no solution can be found to this problem, then unanimous support for act-utilitarianism will be theoretically disastrous.

If we include events in our ontology, then it is incumbent upon us to define a criterion of identity for those events. Glazier surveys the identity criteria of Davidson, Quine, and Kim, and argues that their criteria are either circular or fail to respect our intuitions in certain problematic cases. He proposes a new criterion according to which two events x and y are identical if and only if they cannot be physically analyzed as separate components of a process. Glazier argues that his criterion successfully deals with the cases that are problematic for the other three criteria.

The Blumenberg-Löwith debate over the secularization hypothesis has attracted the attention of scholars interested in the history of ideas. In this paper, Fernández draws from Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age in order to suggest how appeal to modality, in the form of William of Ockham’s notion that God’s absolute power entails the radical contingency of the universe, helped set the stage for the crossing of the epochal threshold of modernity. In the first section, Fernández gives a preliminary background to the famed dispute over the secularization hypothesis. In the second section, he argues that Blumenberg’s thesis of man’s self-assertion of reason trades on Ockham’s notion of radical contingency. And in the third section, Fernández suggests how notions of God’s absolute power helped to replace ideas of “providence” with “progress,” thus ushering in the Modern Age.

Phenomenal externalism, or the externalist version of representationism, is the view that the phenomenal character of experience—how the world seems to you—is exhausted by the intentional content of experience—how your experience represents the world. In the 1970’s, Hilary Putnam argued for externalism about meaning: what a person means by a word is in part dependent on her external environment, such that molecular duplicates whose nervous systems are in the exact same states can nonetheless mean different things by the same word, just by virtue of a difference in their environmental conditions. The lesson drawn by externalists is that meaning ain’t in the head, since it can change without any change in the brain. The phenomenal externalist wishes to say something similar about experience—it is in part dependent on the environment, such that molecular duplicates in the same states can nonetheless have different experiences, just by virtue of a difference in their environmental conditions. Phenomenolgy ain’t in the head either, phenomenal externalists maintain, and can also change without any changes in the brain. Some philosophers find this view attractive since it obviates various traditional problems with locating phenomenology in the head. However, there have also been serious objections to the view. Holliday reviews Ned Block’s famous “Inverted Earth” objection to phenomenal externalism, considers several recent replies to the objection by Michael Tye and Fred Dretske and then makes the case that these replies fail when we consider an empirical, psychological phenomenon known as cross-modal matching. Indeed, the replies of Tye and Dretske, which try to negotiate both Inverted Earth and another infamous thought-experiment involving “Swampman,” threaten to render the phenomenal character of experience epiphenomenal—i.e., causally impotent—which seems to undermine the point of providing an externalist representationist theory of it.

Richard Rorty is professor emeritus of Comparative Literature and Philosophy at Stanford University. Among his many publications are The Linguistic Turn (1967), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1988). Professor Rorty is famous for his distinct views on pragmatism, epistemology, and the fate of analytic philosophy. This interview was conducted via email over the week of March 20, 2006.