Endurant

Endurant

Endurant

taken from DOLCE Lite (http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/DOLCE-Lite.owl)

Endurants can 'genuinely' change in time, in the sense that the very same endurant as a whole can have incompatible properties at different times. To see this, suppose that an endurant - say 'this paper' - has a property at a time t 'it's white', and a different, incompatible property at time t' 'it's yellow': in both cases we refer to the whole object, without picking up any particular part of it.

The main characteristic of endurants is that all of them are independent essential wholes. This does not mean that the corresponding property (being an endurant) carries proper unity, since there is no common unity criterion for endurants. Within endurants, we distinguish between physical and non-physical endurants, according to whether they have direct spatial qualities. Within physical endurants, we distinguish between amounts of matter, objects, and features.