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Format: 1 online resource (xvi, 257 pages) : , digital, PDF file(s).

Edition: Second edition.

ISBN: 9780511612756 (ebook)

Uniform Title: Sameness and substance

Content: In this book, which thoroughly revises and greatly expands his classic work Sameness and Substance (1980), David Wiggins retrieves and refurbishes in the light of twentieth-century logic and logical theory certain conceptions of identity, of substance and of persistence through change that philosophy inherits from its past. In this new version, he vindicates the absoluteness, necessity, determinateness and all or nothing character of identity against rival conceptions. He defends a form of essentialism that he calls individuative essentialism, and then a form of realism that he calls conceptualist realism. In a final chapter he advocates a human being-based conception of the identity and individuation of persons, arguing that any satisfactory account of personal memory must make reference to the life of the rememberer himself. This important book will appeal to a wide range of readers in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and analytic philosophy.

Note: Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015). , Preamble, Chiefly concerned with matters methodological and terminological -- 1. The absoluteness of sameness -- 1. A central question about identity: and rival answers given by defenders of the absoluteness of identity and the relativity of identity -- 2. Leibniz's Law and the difficulties of relative identity -- 3. Five ways for it to be false that [superscript a = b] [subscript g] -- 4. Possible examples of type-(4) relativity -- 5. Some cases that might be alleged to be of type (5) -- 6. Discussion of type-(4) cases -- 7. Discussion of type-(5) cases and some attempted amendments of Leibniz's Law -- 8. A mathematical example supposedly of type (5) -- 9. Conclusion concerning R, the Relativity of Identity -- 10. Absoluteness and sortal dependence jointly affirmed and formalized -- 2. Outline of a theory of individuation -- 1. Proposition D and the rationale of the 'same what?' question -- 2. The charge of circularity, or of emptiness -- 3. The identity of indiscernibles -- 4. Proposition D further explicated and amplified: and D(ii) as the proper development of D -- 5. Existence and sortal predications -- 6. Further D principles -- 7. Miscellaneous further principles; and a doubt about counting -- 3. Sortal concepts: and the characteristic activity or function or purpose of things falling under them -- 1. The sortal predicates of natural kinds -- 2. The other sortal predicates -- 3. Problems of artefact identity -- 4. Two approaches to the problem of artefact identity -- 5. Summary of conclusions to date: and a methodological remark -- 6. Transition to Chapters Four and Five -- 4. Individuative essentialism -- 1. Independence from the explicitly modal of the foregoing theory of individuation -- 2. Principles and maxims governing the derivation of a modest essentialism -- 3. The necessity of identity and the necessity of difference -- 4. Conceivability, theory and essence -- 5. Conceivability continued -- 6. Individuative essentialism and its consequences -- 7. That the idea of haecceities' is as misbegotten as the word itself is unlovely -- 8. The essentialist 'must' and 'can' -- 9. Avoiding overspecificity, allowing vagueness -- 10. Other de re necessities, real or putative: a framework for further inquiry -- 11. The essences of artefacts and the matter of artefacts -- 12. One special kind of artefact: works of art and the essences of these -- 5. Conceptualism and realism -- 1. Anti-realist conceptualism and anti-conceptualist realism -- 2. Four clarifications -- 3. A conventionalist reconstruction of our modal convictions: a conceptualist anti-realist view of essence -- 4. A hypothesis concerning the sources of anti-essentialism -- 5. An exaggeration of conceptualism, deprecated and corrected in the light of certain truisms; and the reply to the anti-conceptualist realist begun -- 6. The perfect consonance of sober realism and sober conceptualism -- 7. The realist requirement restated, refurbished and satisfied -- 8. Concluding suggestions -- 6. Identity: absolute, determinate, and all or nothing, like no other relation but itself -- 1. Three contrasted views of singling out an object -- 2. Back and forth between the object and the thought of the object -- 3. Some putative examples of indeterminate objects -- 4. If object a is the same as object b, then a is determinately the same as b -- 5. What, if anything, follows from such formal derivations? -- 6. Treatment of examples (a), (b), (c); of [actual symbol not reproducible]3 -- 7. Sense and point; and sense as the work of the mind -- 8. On the level of reference, things cannot be simply conceived into being or postulated into existence -- not even material things with matter putatively ready at hand -- 9. Once again (one last time) the things to which simple identity sentences make a reference -- 10. More about the relation of identity -- 11. Might it ever be true to say that a was almost b, that a was almost numerically identical with b? -- 12. Conclusion -- 7. Personal identity -- 1. An expeditious if precipitate answer to the question of personal identity -- 2. Doubts, and answers to doubts: subjects of consciousness -- 3. The Lockean conception; and Butler's criticisms of such conceptions -- 4. A neo-Lockean identity-condition -- 5. Butler's central insight -- 6. A neo-Lockean conception -- 7. Unfinished business -- 8. The theses to be argued in this chapter -- 9. Co-consciousness again, and quasi-memory -- 10. A second and third question about Parfit's definition of 'Q-remember' -- 11. Digression: an alternative method of definition, revealing by its inadequacy the semantical point of the attribution of experiential memory -- 12. More about 'dependent in the right way' -- 13. As it now appears, the state of the whole argument to date -- 14. Participation in the growth of knowledge -- 15. The penultimate problem and a verdict upon it, all leading in due course to a reassessment of the original Shoemaker case -- 16. Brown-Brownson reconsidered -- 17. One last variant -- and the philosophical moral of same. Finally, human persons as artefacts?

Additional Edition: Print version: ISBN 9780521454117

Language: English

URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511612756

URL: Volltext  (lizenzpflichtig)