Persistence without essence

Jessica Leech (King's College London)

Abstract: Questions of persistence and change are central to metaphysics. What changes can an object survive? What changes would destroy of an object? What determines the conditions for persistence and survival for different kinds of things? There is almost always a role for sortal or essential properties to play in theories of persistence, albeit in different ways. But I’m suspicious of many of the claims about sortal properties and essential properties on which so many accounts of persistence conditions rest. I want to think through what persistence looks like if we don’t help ourselves to these assumptions. I will argue that giving these assumptions more scrutiny uncovers a deep and difficult problem when it comes to identity facts, and their relation to qualitative facts.