Perdurance, location and classical mereology
In his (2001) Ted Sider takes care to define the notion of a temporal part and his doctrine of perdurantism using only the temporally indexed notion of parthood 'x is part of y at f rather than the atemporal notion of classical mereology 'x is a part of y* in order to forestall accusations of unintelligibility from his opponents. However, as he notes, endurantists do not necessarily reject the classical mereological notion as unintelligible. They allow that it makes sense and applies to atemporal subject matters and to temporal subject matters when the entities under discussion are not continuants. Thus, they allow that it makes sense to say that metaphysics is a part of philosophy, or that football is a game of two halves. What (some) endurantists deny is only that the classical mereological notion is applicable to continuants: continuants (people, cats, statues, etc.), they say, have no proper parts simpliciter (if we adopt the classical mereological definition we must say that they are atoms), either because it is false to say that they have or because it is unintelligible. Thus perdurantists do not have to embrace Sider's excessive caution in defining their position.1 They can safely allow themselves classical