In Quine 1976a, W. V. Quine attempts to show that, even if you have them, worlds, unlike times, cannot provide robust continuity conditions for the sort of ordinary objects that we want to talk about. Quine begins his paper by explicitly invoking the world–time parallel:

Like Quine we will restrict our discussion to physical objects. Quine's conception of a physical object is given in the second paragraph of his paper:

So Quine's metaphysics is in the mereological tradition examined in the last chapter. We have stressed that this book does not take sides on metaphysical issues, so we make no claims about whether this is a viable metaphysics, or even how precisely it is to be understood. Quine, as we present him, thinks of individuals as ‘worms’ construed as strings of events over times.