Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Introduction

1. In "Shoemaker (Sydney) - Brown-Brownson Revisited" (BBR), Sydney Shoemaker's response to "Wiggins (David) - Sameness and Substance Renewed" (S & SR), I am not sure how many of my own arguments or conclusions I quite recognize.
2. Shoemaker reads me at certain important points as making further moves in a game in which he is a justly acclaimed virtuoso.
3. But S & SR claims in effect that there is no such game and nobody should try to play it.
4. I would that Shoemaker had treated "Wiggins (David) - Personal Identity" (Chapter 7 of S & SR) in its larger context, namely the general theory of identity and individuation¹ and the key claim, which is upheld in "Wiggins (David) - The Absoluteness of Sameness" and "Wiggins (David) - Outline of a Theory of Individuation" (Chapters 1 and 2) and illustrated in "Wiggins (David) - Sortal Concepts: and the Characteristic Activity or Function or Purpose of their Compliants" (Chapter 3) that judgments of identity depend on sortal² identifications, which in their turn determine a dialectic or casuistic of same and other that licenses or prescribes only judgments that respect, in their collectivity, the laws of identity.
5. This is the true source of D(x), the Only a and b principle, about which Shoemaker so briefly expresses himself as so doubtful, and of the distinction that Chapter 7 seeks to secure between particular and universal. See below₃. Part V.