Change and Change-Maker

• Applicant: Dr. Florian Fischer
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 435173520

The research agenda of the network is to enrich the debate about persistence. Persistence is the phenomenon that entities exist through time. When they change during their temporal existence, they exemplify incompatible properties. Take a mood light which changes from green to red: being completely green is incompatible with being completely red, yet it is the same mood light that has both properties. The contemporary debate about persistence is de facto a debate about change: it revolves around the question how to conceptualize persistence without letting the incompatibility of the properties involved in a change succumb to a contradiction.While the debate about persistence is only de facto a debate about change, there is another debate within philosophy which is explicitly about change; namely, the debate about powers. So far, these two debates have been quite independent of each other. The debate about powers concerns change in much broader sense than the debate about persistence: It investigates the role that powers play in bringing about the changes in the world. The mood light from our example had the power to be red beforehand. Its power for becoming red has manifested - maybe in concert with some external stimulus that has initiated the change.Many of the central terms (like dispositions, capacities and powers) used in this debate are ontologically quite laden. As we neither implicitly nor explicitly want to restrict the investigation from the get-go, we introduce the term of art change-makers to denote those entities that bring about changes. Our research field is the debate about persistence, and thus we do not want to restrict ourselves to one specific account of powers. Rather our agenda is more general: we want to utilize the expertise of the debate about change-makers to shed new light on the debate about persistence.We illuminate the connection of persistence and change-makers from various sides: apart from the systematic metaphysical questions which are in the focus of the network, we will also investigate the semantics and the formal aspects of change. Furthermore, attention will be given to important but so for underrepresented historical treatments of change and persistence. Different views, prominent in the middle age, which have very much influenced the contemporary debate will be considered. The philosophy of Henri Bergson will also be considered in this context, whose account of processes seems very well suited to bridge the gap between change-makers and persistence.Summing up, the network will bring together researchers working on change and persistence to develop a novel understanding of persistence. To achieve this ambitious goal, we have assembled an international team of experts from complementary areas within philosophy. The various methodological and contentual approaches united by one clear-cut research agenda will enable us to illuminate every corner of the enriched understanding of persistence.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks