So then, Heller’s argument does apparently raise a few issues that the endurantist must face if their theory is to hold on to its grasp of explanatory value, and further still it seems that the only hope for maintaining a theory of transtemporal identity lies in the theories of the endurantists because the problems discovered within perdurantist theory seem to be far too problematic to be simply resolved. Fortunately, there have been a number of endurantist responses to Heller’s argument that have sought to undermine the force of his attack. The responses all vary in the way in which they avoid dodging the contradiction that Heller attempts to press upon them, and as such, shall be treated in turn.

The first response I shall address comes from endurantists of the strictest sort, the camp of the mereological essentialists. The mereological essentialism theorists

…deny that objects can remain identical through a change in their parts. They hold onto the…the view that whatever parts a thing has, it has essentially or necessarily. These endurantists take persistence through time to involve the numerical identity of a thing existing at one time with a thing existing at another; and while they concede that it is possible for a things to remain identical through many kinds of change, they deny that it is possible for a thing to survive the loss of any of its parts. (Loux, 241)

Thus, the mereological essentialist can evade the contradiction by making the claim that Descartes simply does not survive the amputation, that something else is there, but it is not Descartes. Thus, since Descartes is destroyed in the process of the amputation, but Descartes(-) survives, it simply cannot be logically argued that they are one and the same person. As Loux points out, however, this response to Heller’s claim immediately raises cautionary flags, as if all parts of a person are necessary, the loss of the smallest particulate subunit of one’s body means the certain destruction of said person (if one holds on to bodily identity), or at least the destruction of one’s body and the creation or survival of something different. Further, this view seems highly unlikely to survive in its current form, for the chemical skeletons of the universe are far from stable or static as modern science shows us, and it is highly improbable that any object will not undergo many losses and gains of particulate parts, especially in the case of living systems.

In order to provide some sort of hope for the mereological take on the matter at hand, Roderick Chisholm attempts to make a linguistic distinction between what we mean by the ‘same’ thing. Chisholm claims that there is a critical distinction between our colloquial, “loose and popular” use of the ‘sameness’ relationship, and the regimented, “strict and philosophical” sense (Loux, 241). Under Chisholm’s take on things, we are capable of making colloquial reference to continuity of objects unproblematically, because the world is actually comprised of primary entities (things in the “strict and philosophical sense”) that are subject to destruction-by-change, but our conceptions of the world are based on the successions of primary entities that result from these changes, the primary entities that are constantly coming into being as a change destroys what was once in a certain place. We can apply general terms, using the colloquial sense of ‘same’ to create the idea of continuity of said objects. So the reason that the paper upon which this dogreat timesent is written remains the same paper as it is exposed to indiscernible chemical and physical changes is simply because the reader is linking the succession of papers that is undergoing the process of destruction and creation together with the non-specific, “loose and popular” referent term ‘paper’, or ‘the paper upon which this dogreat timesent is written’, not because the piece of paper is surviving any of the miniscule changes it is subjected to. Given this particular understanding of mereological essentialism, Chisholm then goes on to make the claim that there is no problem with mereological essentialism and transtemporal identity; quite simply, he proposes, there is some microscopic, unchangeable constant that really is the person that endures through time, some thing that is not the body or the brain or psychological states (Loux, 242).

Some of the problems with the mereological treatment of the issue of transtemporal identity are readily apparent. First and foremost, Chisholm seems to bring any who would side with him straight back into a Dualist framework, though Chisholm would claim that instead of a soul, the object that persists without change and grants identity to a person is some microscopic, undiscovered thing. Regardless, the problem seems to bring us out of the realm of empiricism, stretching further than it may be safe to extrapolate. Another particularly vexing issue for the mereological essentialists is that most people have a strong tendency to suspect that a change can be survived or endured, that such minor alterations as an exchange of an electron or the loss of a hair would not entirely destroy one’s body and replace it with something new. It seems that for a person to endure through time under the mereological framework, one would have to accept that there must be an infinite number of things being destroyed and coming into existence at all times, seemingly overcomplicating the whole process of existence. It seems, yet again pre-philosophically, that it would be much simpler to just posit that things can endure change, and not to require the slightest disturbance to result in the complete erasure of a thing and subsequent manifestation of something almost exactly like it.