By Eli Hirsch
The publication as a complete tackles a cluster of primary metaphysical concerns in a constantly transparent and cautious demeanour. in addition, Hirsch is pleasantly undogmatic and endeavors to offer reasonable therapy to these perspectives he finally rejects. His arguments for his personal conclusions are often all-the-more forceful for that. the traditional of argument is excessive and Hirsch has anything fascinating to assert on each subject he discusses.
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Additional resources for The Concept of Identity
Example text
This shows that continuity by itself is not sufficient for persistence. There are many other cases like this. A log which burns in the fire may go out of existence and turn into a smoldering ash, though there was no discontinuity in the process. A gold coin may be destroyed by continuously melting it down. A table may be continuously filed down until it no longer exists and is replaced by a mere lump of wood. None of these cases can be explained by reference to continuity considerations alone. In general terms the objection is that the simple continuity analysis cannot properly account for our judgments about one object going out of existence and being replaced by another.
A question which may naturally arise now is why it is that some nondispersive concepts figure as standard sortals in our language while others figure only marginally so, or not at all. This question is actually part of a much larger one, as to why our concept of persistence is what it is and not something else. I shall have considerably more to say about this question later, and in more than one context. A preliminary answer to the specific question about sortals, which may seem at least superficially satisfying, is that a nondispersive concept tends to figure as a sortal in our language insofar as this concept is important to us, from some practical or theoretical standpoint.
As an example of the sort of case that I have in mind imagine that at time t we have a large puddle of water, which we will call puddle i. At time t' the puddle is split in two, so that after t' we are confronted with two puddles, puddle aa and puddle 2b. Let us imagine that puddle aa is considerably larger than puddle ab. In such circumstances it would probably seem natural to identify puddle i with the larger fragment aa rather than with the smaller 2b. We could, no doubt, try to account for this in a number of ways, but a very simple explanation, in terms of spatiotemporal continuity, presents itself if we adopt the moderate sense C.