Sameness and Substance Renewed

"Yes, there’s a theme here, in my books. In fact there are a number of themes. This is Sameness and Substance Renewed by David Wiggins, which, like Hugh Mellor’s book, is a rewritten version of an earlier book. David Wiggins’ book is about sameness, that is to say, identity, and it’s about substance as well. What substance means, what Aristotle meant, this very complex concept which has grown up in the history of philosophy where substances are the fundamental realities. Wiggins was someone who was very influenced by Aristotle, and by Leibniz too, and I’m very interested in this book. I find it a fascinating book. One of the things I like about it is the way that he draws eclectically on texts from the history of philosophy to illustrate his points. Another interesting thing about it is that he made a very original contribution to the discussion of personal identity — that is the sameness of persons over time — where he tried to combine views which treat the psychological nature of the person as very important to their identity, with views that treat the biological nature of the human organism as important, and that’s a very original contribution to the view about what makes a person the same person over time. That’s one of the many things in this book. Absolutely. The dominant view of personal identity is the view that comes from Locke, which is that a person is a thinking, reasoning being that thinks for itself as itself, the same thinking thing across time, or something like that. So that means that you are your mind, essentially, and that could just as well be your brain. So it’s not a Cartesian view, but what it means is that if my brain went into your body, and your brain went into my body, then we would have swapped bodies, rather than got new brains. Now, that’s been a very dominant thought in the debate about personal identity over the last 50 to 60 years. What philosophers like Wiggins, and those who follow him, reject about this, is that it’s not so much the connection between being a person, and being a thinking and reasoning thing, but — and this is the way I’d like to put it, rather than the way Wiggins would put it — rather the connection between what you are, and what it is to be a person. So for example, supposing we can agree with Locke, that we only think of something really as a person when it’s a thinking reasoning being. Then I also think that I was once a foetus, and a foetus isn’t a thinking reasoning being. So that means I existed when I was not a person, and to use a concept from Wiggins’ work, a person there is a ‘phase concept.’ Wiggins uses the notion of a phase sortal concept, it’s a concept that only applies to things at certain phases of their existence, like the concept child, or the concept student. It’s a phase you’re going through, and one of the things I take from Wiggins is that you should think of the concept of a person as a phase concept. I existed before I was a person. If by some terrible calamity I went into a persistent vegetative state, then I would continue to exist, but I may not continue to be a person. So I think this has broken the deadlock in the personal identity debate in philosophy. You can now think of yourself, that what you are and the person that you are, can come apart. You are the organism, and for a period of its existence, the organism is a person. That’s a good question. I give it the answer no. When I say that you are an organism, I think you are a living organism. Your death is the end of you. There are other views, some people, I think rather perversely, have argued that dead people are people, so if we’re actually counting the number of people in existence, we have to count all the dead ones too. I don’t think dead people are people, and I don’t think dead organisms are organisms. I didn’t choose them for this reason, but looking at the books I see there is a theme, which is that there’s an orthodoxy in philosophy at the moment that I want to reject. The orthodoxy comes from philosophers like W.V. Quine and David Lewis, and what it says is that what there is in the world is very sparse. Quine once described his philosophy as being dominated by a taste for desert landscapes. He thinks, fundamentally, that there’s just physical particles and everything else on top of that is just a way of talking, so to speak. Lewis says that all there is is just space time with physical properties instantiated over space time, and everything else is just not so real as that. These are very sparse views of reality that put a big emphasis on the material nature of the world, or the physical nature of the world. They take physics as their starting point for metaphysics, or ontology, the theory of being, and their physicalist views of the world. They’re very much in contrast to the views inspired by Aristotle, which see the world as a much more messy place. You know Aristotle’s example of the fundamental being was not an atom, or an electron, but an organism, like a horse, that’s a fundamental being. My books reflect my opposition to that physicalist, sparse world picture which is dominant particularly in American philosophy. I think the views of Descartes, the views of Leibniz and the views of contemporaries — Mellor and Wiggins and Jonathan Lowe — have a much richer, more varied ontology that’s much more sensitive to the messiness of the real world as we encounter it. That’s why I like the idea of substance, which is really what links some of these things together, the idea of substances as the natural unities of the world that we’re trying to discover, that aren’t just the fundamental particles of atomic physics… Many philosophers think that the important question about the nature of the mind is how does the nature of mental things — like thoughts and experiences and emotions — relate to the physical nature of the world, the atoms and the molecules the world is made up of. Many of them think that something like Quine’s and Lewis’ physicalism must be true, and that the world must be fundamentally physical. I don’t think the world is fundamentally physical. So I think, for example, that if a human person is a real thing, and the human mind is a collection of the capacities of the human person, and if the human person is a certain phase of the human organism, these are as fundamentally real as anything in physics, as any atoms or molecules that make the person up. I don’t want to defend a Cartesian view of the mind, but I don’t want to defend a physicalist view either. We should accept the messy reality of the everyday world where we see persons with their minds as fundamental things that need to be understood in their own terms."