Olga asked:

Why has Heraclitus been called the philosopher of Becoming?

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Only a few fragments of Heraclitus's thoughts and teachings have survived the two and a half
thousand or so years since his death.

The most famous example is "You cannot step into the same river twice". Imagine you step into a
river, then you climb out, then you step back in again. Between the first and second immersions, a
great deal of water has flowed past; so you are stepping into a different body of water.

What Heraclitus is saying, in other words, is that facts about change entail that objects don't persist
through time. Nothing just is; everything becomes.

Persistence philosophy has become a lot more systematized in the last hundred years or so. The
default view is that objects do persist — Heraclitus is quite radical in this respect — however, the
pro-persistence camp can be divided three ways, viz:-

Endurantists claim that objects are three dimensional things, wholly present at every moment from
their creation to their destruction. I think this is probably what most people naturally believe. It's
certainly the most popular position in philosophy.

However, endurantism is beset by the problem of change. Take my home, 'Dunroamin'. This morning
it was immaculately clean and tidy. But suppose that this afternoon, loan sharks came and smashed
all the windows. Then 'Dunroamin' this morning has different properties — unbrokenwindowedness —
from this evening's damaged 'Dunroamin'. Now Leibniz's Law states that all and only objects with all
their properties in common are identical. It follows that the two Dunroamins are non-identical, i.e.
different objects.

Perdurantists recognize the endurantist problem with change. They think that objects are four
dimensional things, not wholly present at each moment of their existence, but extended across time in
a way analogous to the way things extend through space. For example, this evening's "timeslice" of
'Dunroamin' is to 'Dunroamin' the 4-D object as my spleen is to my body.

Finally, stage theorists (the classical example being Katherine Hawley, author of How things persist)
deny that there are four dimensional entities over and above timeslices. They think that the timeslices
are the objects, and that they aren't identical with eachother. You might think that means that objects
don't persist. The endurantist Trenton Merricks would agree, according to his review in the Journal of
Philosophyof Hawley's book. Hawley reckons that although timeslices or stages aren't identical with
eachother, nevertheless persisting isn't a matter of identity across time, rather stages persist by
means of standing in "non-supervenient relations" to other suitable stages.

Richard Craven