Invariantism and Transcendentism

In a number of works, Peter Simons proposed an interesting theory of persistence in time, which he sometimes describes as invariantism. Unfortunately, in the last two decades, despite its unquestionable merits, invariantism has attracted little interest among thinkers engaged in the debate over persistence. The debate continues to revolve around well-known solutions, i.e., endurantism, perdurantism, and exdurantism. It seems to ignore the efforts of the few thinkers who try to break the theoretical deadlock that has for many years dominated the discussion. The purpose of this article is, first, to reconstruct and critically analyze Simons’ invariantist theory, and second, to compare it with another theoretical proposal, namely transcendentism, recently advanced by Damiano Costa and Alessandro Giordani. By means of a simple comparative analysis, I shall try to show that these views are convergent: they differ only in a few elements that are either negligible or could be accepted within both theories. This result should not, however, be interpreted as an attempt to formulate a hybrid position. On the one hand, transcendentism can be treated, to some extent, as a fairly natural foundation of invariantism, whereas invariantism canbe regarded as a technical development of transcendentism (providing it with a suitable remedy for some interpretative difficulties). On the other hand, invariantism and transcendentism interpret temporal location of objects completely differently, and so, at the end of the day, their paths must diverge. The indirect aim of the paper is to show that both invariantism and transcendentism should no longer be ignored in the debate on the nature of persistence