Jessica Leech (KCL) Persistence without essence

Questions of persistence and change are central to metaphysics. What  changes can an object survive? What changes would destroy of an object?  What determines the conditions for persistence and survival for  different kinds of things? There is almost always a role for sortal or  essential properties to play in theories of persistence, albeit in  different ways. But I’m suspicious of many of the claims about sortal  properties and essential properties on which so many accounts of  persistence conditions rest. I want to think through what persistence  looks like if we don’t help ourselves to these assumptions. I will argue  that giving these assumptions more scrutiny uncovers a deep and  difficult problem when it comes to identity facts, and their relation to  qualitative facts.