Can I be an Instantaneous Stage and yet Persist Through Time?

Abstract in Undetermined An alternative to the standard endurance/perdurance accounts of persistence has recently been developed: the stage theory (Sider, 2001; Hawley, 2001). According to this theory, a persisting object is identical with an instantaneous stage (temporal part). On the basis of Leibniz’s Law, I argue that stage theorists either have to deny the alleged identity (i.e. give up their central thesis) or hold that stages are both instantaneous and continuants. I subsequently show that, although stage theory is flexible enough to accommodate the latter claim, the cost for accommodating it is an excessive proliferation of persistence concepts