A perdurant extends through time in virtue of having temporal parts, so it does not directly instantiate any of its temporary properties. If my cold mug was hot, its later temporal parts directly instantiate cooler temperatures, and its earlier temporal parts directly instantiate hotter ones. However construed as a temporally extended whole, the mug only derivatively instantiates heat and coldness, in virtue of its parts doing so. In fact, the mug doesn’t have a temperature at all - its parts do, but the mug itself doesn’t. I’ll call this the perdurantist’s problem of temporary properties.

I argue that Parsons (2000) inadvertently supplies the perdurantist with the tools they need to solve this problem when he posits ‘distributional properties’ which are instantiated by objects over a spatial region or interval of time. If we select the entire pattern of a certain kind of temporary property an event instantiates over its lifetime, then we can say that the whole event does indeed directly instantiate those of its properties that change, in virtue of instantiating this special kind of property.