To mark the birthday of David below is a relatively recent and welcome return by him to metaphysics after moving away, primarily to ethics, for the latter part of his career. Sameness and Substance would figure in my top twenty favourite philosophical books, historical or contemporary, and one of a handful of direct influences upon my…
The very excellent Joshua Rust has made this paper published in Journal of Social Ontology freely available. Derek Parfit famously sought to illuminate his account of personal identity by comparing a person to a club. If Parfit could use our intuitions about clubs to help motivate his neo-Lockean account of personal identity over time, which resists…
My contribution to the C+T symposium on Roger Scruton’s Conservatism. antifragileConservatismidentityidentity politicsPolitical philosophyRoger ScrutonToleration
Born on this day — a true gentleman in every sense. If ever Wiggins was miffed that I preferred to talk to him about his metaphysics rather than his ethics, he never let on. Sameness and Substance Renewed (2001) and its two precursors, 1967’s Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity and 1980’s Sameness and Substance, jointly remain one of my favourite reads. See discussion of…
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SYMBOLIC ASSERTION AND A SPACE-TIME EVENT If one examines the characteristic moments of the scientific method, one will discover that they are basically assertions. Even if one happens to be an operationalist and maintains that the business of science is defining the physical operations by which concepts are arrived at and…
One of my favourite living philosophers (if not the favourite) is David Wiggins. He was my tutor for ethics but not unfortunately for metaphysics which by then had become a secondary interest for him. Great to see that he has just released a new book gathering several of his most important essays on identity in one volume.…
After a long break from writing on metaphysics the wonderful David Wiggins has a freely available paper published in the European Journal of Philosophy. Sameness and Substance remains one of the most satisfying (and most difficult) reads I’ve ever experienced. Forty four years ago I published a short monograph called Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity, henceforth ISTC…
Though it’s going on 40 years since Performance was made (1968, released in 1970) it is still the most modern of films with “adult themes” (philosophical and otherwise) from an age when films weren’t primarily made for fuckwits. The themes of social, sexual and gender identity make the fuss being made about these issues now seem so tired…
THE HARVARD REVIEW OF PHILOSOPHY vol.XII no.1 I particularly learned from his criticism of dividing philosophy into what he called ‘isms’ and schools of philosophy. He believed there were many philosophical questions and ways of arguing about them, but that attaching labels like ‘physicalism’ or ‘idealism’ to any particular way of answering philosophical questions was…
Evan’s latest reviewed in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews beingBuddhismconsciousnessDreamingenactivismEvan Thompsonidentitymeditationmind-bodyneurophenomenologyneurosciencephenomenologyPhilosophy of mindselfsituated cognitionwaking
manwithoutqualities 