Notes for 11/4/2025

 

11/4/2025

[Philosophy Club every Tuesday at 5:00pm in CAS 436 ("The Cave")]

[Challenge for today: Try to think of (and possibly ask) at least one question.]

If you could choose whether or not to be reincarnated, but with no memory at all of your previous life, how would you choose?

 

Problems of identity

 

What, exactly, is identity?

 

Strict identity is usually explained in terms of Leibniz’s Law

 

Leibniz’s Law is the combination of two principles:

 

Identity of indiscernibles: If x and y have all the same properties, then x =y.

(All difference is a difference in properties. For x and y to be different, one must have a property the other doesn’t have.)

 

Indiscernibility of identicals: If x=y, then there are no properties that one has that the other doesn’t have.

 

LL: x=y if and only if x and y have all the same properties.

 

Synchronic identity: Identity at a single time.

 

Diachronic identity: identity at different times.

“How can something change and still be the same?”

 

Diachronic identity = LL minus spatial and temporal properties

 

Best known example of the problem of diachronic identity = “Ship of Theseus”

 

Potentially all the material parts of the ship could change, but we would say it is still the same ship.

What, exactly, bears the identity of the ship? (What are the essential properties of the ship?)

 

Traditionally, judgments of diachronic identity distinguish between essential and accidental properties.

 

X can be diachronically identical to y so long as x and y have all the same essential properties.

 

Identity is problematic for things having parts.

 

Do judgments of diachronic identity require something that remains invariant across changes?

 

What happens with judgments of diachronic identity for people? (persons)

 

If materialism is true, then people are collections of parts.

 

Theories of personal identity:

-    Bodily identity (or brain theory)

-    Dualism (soul theory)

-    Psychological theory

 

 

“I am not the man I was.”

 

There must something that the word ‘I’ refers to in both uses, but there is also difference asserted of the first and second ‘I’.

John Locke: “Person is a forensic term.” (Having to do with assignments of responsibility.)

 

Where does responsibility attach? To the soul? To the body? Or to the personality? (reincarnation)

 

Locke’s view of personal identity:

-    Largely a personality view

 

First, let’s look at his view of diachronic identity in general:

-    Artifacts (such as ships)

-    Plants

-    Animals

-    Human bodies

 

How is it possible for us to THINK of changing things as retaining identity

 

 

The thing in question changes gradually where at given time of replacement, a majority of parts remains in place.

Our minds link these changes together in a chain. (“Chain of stages”)

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