The paper defends Gareth Evan's argument against vague identity "de re" from a criticism that quantum mechanics provides actual counter-examples to its validity. A more general version of Evans's argument is stated in which identity involving properties are not essential and it is claimed that the scientific facts as so far known are consistent with the Evansian thesis that indeterminacy in truth-value must always be due to semantic indecision.

The aim of the paper is to discuss some recent variants of familiar puzzles concerning the relations of parts to wholes put forward by Trenton Merricks and Eric Olson. The argument is put forward that so long as the familiar distinction between 'loose and popular' and 'strict and philosophical' senses of identity claims is accepted the paradoxical conclusions at which Merricks and Olson arrive can be resisted. It is not denied that accepting the distinction between 'loose and popular' and 'strict (...) and philosophical' senses of identity claims is itself a departure from common-sense, but it is argued that it is the smallest such departure available to us. (shrink)

Personal pronoun revisionism (so-called by Olson, E. 2007. What are We? A Study in Personal Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University Press) is a response to the problem of the thinking animal on behalf of the neo-Lockean theorist. Many worry about this response. The worry rests on asking the wrong question, namely: how can two thinkers that are so alike differ in this way in their cognitive capacities? This is the wrong question because they don't. The right question is: how can they (...) fail to be the same? From the materialist viewpoint shared by the animalist and neo-Lockean they can't. Personal pronoun revisionism is a consequence of their cognitive identity. (shrink)

According to the presentist the present time is the only one that there is. Nevertheless, things persist. Most presentists think that things persist by enduring. Employing E. J. Lowe’s notion of identity-dependence, Jonathan Tallant argues that presentism is incompatible with any notion of persistence, even endurance. This consequence of Lowe’s ideas, if soundly drawn, is important. The presentist who chooses to deny persistence outright is a desperate figure. However, though Lowe’s notion is a legitimate and worthwhile one, this application is (...) faulty. The incompatibility of presentism and persistence is not part of Lowe’s heritage. A positive conclusion can be drawn. A form of persistence is compatible with presentism. It is one on which persistence is defined in tensed terms using an adverbial tense operator: x persists iff x exists and existed or will exist. Unsurprisingly, so understood persistence is endurance. The commonly held view is correct. (shrink)

Van Inwagen has an ingenious argument for the non-existence of human artefacts . But the argument cannot be accepted, since human artefacts are everywhere. However, it cannot be ignored. The proper response to it is to treat it as a refutation of its least plausible premise, i.e., to ‘tollens’ it. I first set out van Inwagen’s argument. I then identify its least plausible premise and explain the consequence of denying it, that is, the acceptance of a plenitudinous, pluralist ontology. I (...) argue that denying it is not so difficult, since its denial is an easy consequence of ordinary beliefs. I finish by explaining why van Inwagen has not persuaded me that it may be that artefacts do not exist and conclude that nothing stands in the way of tollensing van Inwagen and accepting the consequence of doing so. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the suggestion that a psychological approach must be mistaken, because, in fact, the correct account of personal identity is given by the biological approach, according to which we are human beings whose identity over time requires no kind of psychological continuity or connectedness whatsoever. A number of authors support this suggestion, including Paul Snowdon, Peter van Inwagen, and Eric Olson. This also presumes that humans, i.e. members of the species Homo sapiens, are animals of a certain kind. (...) It does not rule out the possibility of persons that are not human beings or animals, but it insists that we are all human animals, possessing the persistence conditions of human animals. This biological approach is often rejected with the notion that it conflicts with human intuition, as can be seen in the transplant case. (shrink)

Personites are shorter lived, very person‐like things that extend across part but not the whole of a person's life. That there are such things is a consequence of the standard perdurance view championed by Lewis and Quine; it is also a consequence of liberal endurantist views which allow such things coinciding with persons during part of their lives, though not themselves parts of the persons. Johnston and Olson argue that the existence of personites has bizarre moral consequences and renders what (...) are manifestly wholly uncontentious moral judgements contentious. It suffices to note that, e.g., they say that if there is a personite now coinciding with me that will no longer exist tomorrow, though I will, this renders morally problematic my planned visit to the dentist today, since the personite, unlike me, will suffer the pain today but not live long enough to experience any gain. The same reasoning renders morally problematic spending time learning a difficult language in anticipation of a trip abroad. And irritatingly, in accordance with this reasoning, the child who claims that making him do his homework ‘isn't fair’, turns out to be arguably right. Moreover, since not only persons and personites, if they exist, but also, for example, dogs and what we might call caninites, would seem to have a right to be counted in the moral calculus, it can also be argued that just as it is morally problematic to force a lazy child to do homework, it is morally problematic to put an obese dog on a strict diet. What underpins the reasoning here is the basic thought that no relation one sentient being has to another can deprive it of the right to be counted in the moral calculus. Hence, the relation a personite has to a person cannot do so. Given this basic thought the acknowledgement of the existence of personites is, Johnston argues, morally disastrous or at least dictates an extreme hedonism. (shrink)

In Naming and Necessity Kripke introduces the concept of a rigid designator and argues that proper names are rigid designators. He argues that in this way they are different from typical definite descriptions (though he allows that some definite descriptions, e.g., ‘the actual winner of the lottery’, ‘the square of 3’, are rigid designators). His opponents have either argued that names can be regarded as abbreviations of rigid descriptions (e.g., ‘actualized’ ones) or have tried to deny that names are rigid (...) designators. I shall argue that no unambiguous descriptions are non-rigid. All unambiguous descriptions are rigid. The appearance of non-rigidity in descriptions is simply an illusion, a manifestation of ambiguity. I shall then go on to show that an explanation of the difficulty which has been found in extending the rigid/non-rigid distinction from singular terms to predicates follows. (shrink)

The response to Kripke’s modal argument I wish to propose appeals to the distinction between indicative descriptions, i.e., descriptions formed using indicative verb forms, and what I shall call subjunctive descriptions, descriptions formed using non-indicative verb forms used in subjunctive conditionals. The contrast is between ‘the person who is richer than anyone else in the world’ and ‘the person who would have been richer than anyone else in the world’. The response to Kripke’s modal argument is that indicative descriptions are (...) always rigid designators and so do not contrast with proper names. (shrink)

In On The Plurality of Worlds Lewis presents the case of the Great Western Railway as a candidate counter-example, along with the usual suspects, to the thesis that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time. Typically, pluralists or many-thingers, i.e., those who reject the thesis, point to modal or historical or aesthetic differences to justify their judgement of non-identity. Lewis’s aim to is to show the inadequacy of this justification, at least as regards modal differences, (...) by considering a case in which it clearly fails, in which the judgement of non-identity so based is incredible, and hence to make it evident that in all such cases the appeal to modal differences is insufficient. What makes the case of the Great Western Railway special is that it is a purely spatial example, as Lewis emphasises. In what follows I set out the example and try to make it clear that, as Lewis says, for this reason a judgement of non-identity based on an appeal to modal differences is incredible. Then I give another example, easier to understand, I think, which makes the same point, inspired by Russell’s famous joke about the irate yacht owner. (shrink)

In part I of this paper I defend Locke's account of personal identity against three well-known objections; in part II, I put forward a criticism of my own.

This article argues for a realist conception of human needs. By ‘realist’ we mean that certain fundamental needs are categorically distinct from consumer wants, holding independently of people's subjective beliefs as objective life requirements. These basic needs, we contend, are baseline measures of social justice in the sense that no society that does not prioritise their satisfaction can be legitimate. The paper concludes with a comprehensive response to seven core objections to our position.

As infancy is characterized by rapid physical growth and critical periods of development, disruptions due to illness or disease reveal vulnerability associated with this period. Spinal cord injury has devastating consequences at any age, but its onset neonatally, at birth, or within the first year of life multiplies its impact. The immediate physical and physiological consequences are obvious and immense, but the effects on the typical trajectory of development are profound. Activity-based restorative therapies capitalize on activity-dependent plasticity of the neuromuscular (...) system below the lesion and when provided to children with SCI aim to improve the child’s neuromuscular capacity, health and quality of life. This is a report of an infant with a cervical SCI at birth resulting in paralysis of leg and trunk muscles and paresis of arm and hands who was enrolled in an ABRT program at 3 years of age. After 59 sessions of ABRT, the child demonstrated significant improvements in trunk control and arm function, as well as social and emotional development. Despite the chronicity of injury and low expectations for improvement with therapeutic interventions, ABRT had a positive impact on the child’s physical capacity and provided benefits across multiple developmental domains. (shrink)

Born in Granada, April 30, 1901, Antonio De Luna was educated in the universities of Granada and of Madrid, continued his studies at Freiburg in Bresgovia, Paris, and Oxford and received the doctorate in law from Bologna. At the age of 27 he was appointed to the chair of natural law at the University of La Laguna in the Canary Isles, and from there went on to Salamanca and Granada. In 1932 he obtained the chair of international public law of (...) the Faculty of Law of the University of Madrid. At this time he began a period of intense professional activity: He was Secretary of the Federation of Spanish Associations of International Studies (1932–1936), founder and director of the Institute of International and Economic Studies (1932–1936), and Secretary of the Juridical Assessory Commission of the Spanish Republic (1931–1934). After the interruption of the Civil War, Luna, with a sense of continuity, resumed his essential tasks. (shrink)

A growing number of research misconduct cases handled by the Office of Research Integrity involve image manipulations. Manipulations may include simple image enhancements, misrepresenting an image as something different from what it is, and altering specific features of an image. Through a study of specific cases, the misconduct findings associated with image manipulation, detection methods and those likely to identify such manipulations, are discussed. This article explores sanctions imposed against guilty researchers and the factors that resulted in no misconduct finding (...) although relevant images clearly were flawed. Although new detection tools are available for universities and journals to detect questionable images, this article explores why these tools have not been embraced. (shrink)

What am I? And what is my relationship to the thing I call ‘my body’? Thus each of us can pose for himself the philosophical problems of the nature of the self and the relationship between a person and his body. One answer to the question about the relationship between a person and the thing he calls ‘his body’ is that they are two things composed of the same matter at the same time (like a clay statue and the piece (...) of clay which presently constitutes it). This is the ‘constitution view’. In this paper we give a novel overview of the literature on personal identity, the constitution view, and surrounding topics. (shrink)

Divers (2014) presents a set of de re modal truths which, he claims, are inconvenient for Lewisean modal realism. We argue that there is no inconvenience for Lewis.

Much of the debate about identity in recent decades has been about personal identity, and specifically about personal identity over time, but identity generally, and the identity of things of other kinds, have also attracted attention. Various interrelated problems have been at the centre of discussion, but it is fair to say that recent work has focussed particularly on the following areas: the notion of a criterion of identity; the correct analysis of identity over time, and, in particular, the disagreement (...) between advocates of perdurance and advocates of endurance as analyses of identity over time; the notion of identity across possible worlds and the question of its relevance to the correct analysis of de re modal discourse; the notion of contingent identity; the question of whether the identity relation is, or is similar to, the composition relation; and the notion of vague identity. A radical position, advocated by Peter Geach, is that these debates, as usually conducted, are void for lack of a subject matter: the notion of absolute identity they presuppose has no application; there is only relative identity. Another increasingly popular view is the one advocated by Lewis: although the debates make sense they cannot genuinely be debates about identity, since there are no philosophical problems about identity. Identity is an utterly unproblematic notion. What there are, are genuine problems which can be stated using the language of identity. But since these can be restated without the language of identity they are not problems about identity. (For example, it is a puzzle, an aspect of the so-called “problem of personal identity”, whether the same person can have different bodies at different times. But this is just the puzzle whether a person can have different bodies at different times. So since it can be stated without the language of personal “identity”, it is not a problem about identity, but about personhood.) This article provides an overview of the topics indicated above, some assessment of the debates and suggestions for further reading. (shrink)