Review of Four-dimensionalism

“The truth, ” Quine says, “is that you can bathe in the same river twice, but not in the same river stage. You can bathe in two river stages which are stages of the same river, and this is what constitutes bathing in the same river twice. A river is a process through time, and the river stages are its momentary parts. ” (Quine 1953, p. 65) Quine’s view is four-dimensionalism, and that is what Theodore Sider’s book is about. In Sider’s usage, four-dimensionalism is the view that, necessarily, anything in space and time has a distinct temporal part, or stage, corresponding to each time at which it exists (p. 59). The book is structured theory-first: in the first chapter, Sider states the the-ory he’s talking about. The remaining chapters (with the exception of chapter 3 which offers a more consolidated and precise statement of four-dimensionalism, as well as its main rival, three-dimensionalism) consist of argument. Chapter 2 offers a series of arguments against presentism — the view that only the present exists. Chapter 4 catalogues a rather miscellaneous group of arguments for four-dimensionalism, including such favourites as analogies between space and time