AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

According to perdurantism, the survival relation obtains between two person-stages just in case they are both temporal parts of the same person. According to a degree-based view of survival, the survival relation admits of degrees. This paper considers three ways in which perdurantists can accommodate a degree-based view of survival: they could introduce gradations to the property of being a person-stage (person-stage approach), the parthood relation between person-stages and persons (mereological approach), or the connection relation between person-stages in a person (topological approach). A formal mereological framework is formulated for representing the perdurantist view of survival, and it is shown that all three approaches can be implemented in independently motivated extensions of the framework. It is argued that of the three approaches, the topological approach offers the greatest flexibility when it comes to accounting for non-symmetric instances of survival and allows perdurantism to share the advantages of exdurantism over endurantism.