Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Introduction

• Though its central thesis and initial strategy remain the same, this is much more than a revision of Wiggins' 1967 "Wiggins (David) - Identity & Spatio-temporal Continuity". It is a subtle and elaborate defense of a theory of individuation presented with a command of traditional and contemporary sources I cannot hope to match or to convey here. Sameness and Substance is a difficult book; Wiggins' avowed effort to be understood will be lost on those who are not prepared to follow the intricacy of his response to criticism and to look for the relevance of papers written since 1967 and listed in the preface. In addition to footnotes and cross references to the text, there is a set of longer notes that one can scarcely neglect.
• "Everything that exists is a this such," we are told at the outset; and the project is in part to give Aristotelian content to the question, 'What is it?' by arguing that the truth of an identity – that this thing is the same as that – requires the existence of an answer "known or unknown" to the question 'same what?' This is thesis D, the "Thesis of the Sortal Dependency of Individuation," and its content is to be gleaned initially from the denial of an independent thesis, the "Thesis of the Relativity of Identity," which says that one and the same thing can be of different kinds or sorts, and so the same f but not the same g, where 'f' and 'g' stand in for "sortals" or "sortal predicates" or "sortal concept names."
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