ABSTRACT
Parmenides of Elea, who lived during the fifth and sixth centuries bce, is generally regarded as the most important and influential of the Presocratic philosophers. His philosophical views were articulated in a poem, large fragments of which have been preserved through the writings of other philosophers. Parmenides seems to have thought that all change involves generation and destruction. Suppose that Parmenides stands up. Intrinsic properties are attributes that something can have regardless of what the rest of the world is like. Perdurantism is the theory of persistence that seems to fit most naturally with the ever-popular eternalist theory of time. Perdurantism also solves some of the puzzles that raise the problem of material constitution. According to Parfit, there is no question that a human person can survive the removal of one hemisphere of their brain. Moreover, he says, technology presents the only obstacle to surviving a hemispherectomy followed by a transplant of the resulting half-brain.
