Or consider the version of endurantism defended by Doug Ehring (1997). On
Ehring’s view, objects enjoy a changing series of temporary intrinsic properties by
enjoying a series of short-lived intrinsic tropes. In effect, Ehring proposes endurant-
ism for substances but the doctrine of temporal parts for properties: to be F attis to
just-plain-instantiate an F-trope that is located att. On this view, the time that the
F-trope is located is not a term that I stand in an F-relation towards. (Or at least not a
fundamentalF-relation; what is primary is the having of a trope.) So far, so good. But
in order for the Ehring view to not have the implication that times are fundamental,
the relation oflocationthat the trope bears to the time cannot be perfectly natural.
(Note that non-fundamental things can stand in relations to fundamental things;
the restriction we have been operating with is that non-fundamental things can’t
stand in perfectly natural relations to anything,period.) So is this location relation
perfectly natural?
The preceding discussion presupposed an eternalist framework about time. But in
chapter 3, we discussed alternatives to this framework. One alternative is presentism.
If presentism is true, then there are no other times, and to have a property at the
present moment is simply to have the property, period. On the presentist’s view, one
could simply say that some personsflat out instantiate qualia and (given the full
reality of qualia) are accordingly themselves fully real. As discussed in section 3.5, I’m
no fan of presentism. But presentism is not the only view capable of yielding the
desired consequence. In section 3.7, I discussed the Hybrid view, which was a
conjunction of PEP—the view that past existence and present existence are modes
of being—and the view that things that presently exist just plain have properties
whereas things that pastly exist have properties merely relative to times. Given the
Hybrid view, presently existing things can also just plain have qualia, and hence
can enjoy full reality. (How to handle the enjoying of past properties by past
objects, though, is still tricky to navigate and worth contemplating further!)^38
We haven’t settled whether the argument from qualia is successful in establishing
the full reality of persons. I doubt we can settle this. What I have hoped to do so far is
simply to demonstrate the complexity of the route from the fundamentality of qualia
to the full reality of persons. It looks like the best-case scenario for an appeal to
qualia is one in which persons persist through enduring and either presentism or
PEP is true.
There is one last candidate class of putatively perfectly natural properties that
I wish to consider. Unlike qualia, these properties definitely are had permanently by
the things that have them, and so issues concerning persistence over time need not
concern us. The question we will address here is whether they are fundamental
properties. The properties in question arehaecceities, properties of beingthat very
thing. In section 6.7, we will examine more closely the assumption that haecceities are
(^38) Thanks to Tim Leisz for helpful discussion here.