Space-Time as a Primitive for Space and Motion

This paper deals with the issue of the representation of space and motion, and argues that motion can be taken as a primitive notion on which a theory of space can be built, in which every object is an occurrent and has temporal parts. There has been a lot of discussion around the continuants/ occurrents opposition; while some authors have advocated the use of occurrents only for theories of parts and the geometry of common-sense, the few detailed or convincing work that has been devoted to solving the inherent problems of such an approach has made it easy for its detractors to claim it is a dead-end street. We present here a theory of spatio-temporal entities and show how this theory can be used to define a theory of motion. Thus we define a notion of continuity that is more appropriate than mathematical continuity for characterizing motion, and argue that we have here a basis for a theory of spatio-temporal objects.