Category: Identity and Individuation
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Does Classical Theism Logically Require Haecceitism?
Haecceitism is the doctrine that there are haecceities. But what is an haecceity? Suppose we take on board for the space of this post the assumptions that (i) properties are abstract objects, that (ii) they can exist unexemplified, and that (iii) they are necessary beings. We may then define the subclass of haecceity properties as…
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London Ed on Geach on Intentional Identity
I am happy to see that Ed is back to blogging. It have reproduced his latest entry and added some comments. ……………….. Peter Geach (“Intentional Identity.” Journal of Philosophy 64, 627-32, reprinted in Logic Matters. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972) argues that the following sentence can be true even if there are no witches, yet…
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Is Anything Real Self-Identical?
I am sometimes tempted by the following line of thought. But I am also deeply suspicious of it. Are the 'laws of thought' 'laws of reality' as well? Since such laws are necessities of thought, the question can also be put by asking whether or not the necessities of thought are also necessities of being.…
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Guilt and Identity
Can I assuage my feelings of guilt over a long past misdeed by telling myself that I was a different person then? Not very well. I was different all right, but not numerically. One could try to soften strict numerical identity of a person over time by adopting a bundle theory of diachronic personal identity. …
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Lecturer on Personal Identity Denied Honorarium
The members of the philosophy department were so convinced by the lecturer's case against personal identity that they refused to pay him his honorarium on the ground that the potential recipient could not be the same person as the lecturer. This from a piece by Stanley Hauerwas: It is by no means clear to me…
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Being is Said in Many Ways: On the Uses of ‘Is’
Chad reports: In the opening pages of More Kinds of Being: A Further Study of Individuation, Identity, and the Logic of Sortal Terms (Blackwell, 2009), E. J. Lowe distinguishes five uses of ‘is’ as a copula: 1. The ‘is’ of attribution, as in ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘Grass is green’.2. The ‘is’ of identity, as…
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A Question About Predication and Identity
Chad M. sent me a paper of his in which he illustrates the distinction between the 'is' of predication and the 'is' of identity using the following examples: 1. Joseph Ratzinger is [the] Pope and 2. Water is H2O where the first sentence is proposed as an example of a predication and the second as…
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Does the Notion of a Bare Particular Make Sense Only in Constituent Ontology?
The Dispute In an earlier entry that addressed Lukas Novak's argument against bare particulars I said the following: The notion of a bare particular makes sense only in the context of a constituent ontology according to which ordinary particulars, 'thick particulars' in the jargon of Armstrong, have ontological constituents or metaphysical parts. [. . .]…
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Constituent Ontology and the Problem of Change
In an earlier entry I sketched the difference between constituent ontology (C-ontology) and relational ontology (R-ontology) and outlined an argument against R-ontology. I concluded that post with the claim that C-ontology also faces serious objections. One of them could be called the 'argument from change.' The Argument from Change Suppose avocado A, which was unripe…
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Bare Particulars and Lukáš Novák’s Argument Against Them
In his contribution to the book I am reviewing, Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic (Ontos Verlag, 2012), Lukáš Novák mounts an Aristotelian argument against bare particulars. In this entry I will try to understand his argument. I will hereafter refer to Professor Novák as 'LN' to avoid the trouble of having to paste in the diacriticals…
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Stanislav Sousedik’s “Towards a Thomistic Theory of Predication”
Enough of politics, back to some hard-core technical philosophy. If nothing else, the latter offers exquisite escapist pleasures not unlike those of chess. Of course I don't believe that technical philosophy is escapist; my point is a conditional one: if it is, its pleasures suffice to justify it as a form of recuperation from this all-too-oppressive world of…
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More on my Non-Identity With My Living Body
Maximilian J. Nightingale writes: You laid out this syllogism in a recent post: My living body will become a dead body; I will never become a dead body; therefore, I am not identical to a living body. It seems to me that if "becoming" means the same thing in both the first and the second…
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Am I a Body or Do I Have a Body?
In his latest and last book, Mortality, Christopher Hitchens writes, "I don't have a body, I am a body." (86) He goes on to observe that he has "consciously and regularly acted as if this was [sic] not true." It is a curious fact that mortalists are among the worst abusers of the fleshly vehicle. …
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The Aporetics of Existence and Self-Identity
Andrew B. made some powerful objections to a recent existence post. His remarks suggest the following argument: Argument A 1. Existence is self-identity2. My existence is contingent: (∃x)(x = I) & Poss ~(∃x) (x = I)Therefore3. My self-identity is contingent: I = I & Poss ~ (I = I) Argument A may be supplemented by…
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The Problem of First-Person identity Sentences
0. Am I identical to my (living) body, or to the objectively specifiable person who rejoices under the name 'BV'? Earlier I resoundingly denied this identity, in (rare) agreement with London Ed, but admitted that argument is needed. This post begins the argument. We start with the problem of first-person identity sentences. 1. 'I am…