Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Introduction

1. This paper argues that each of the so-called puzzles
   1. Of the Ship of Theseus¹,
   2. Of Tibbles-and-Tib², and
   3. Of the Statue-and-its-matter³
   has a straightforward solution within ontologies that allow Aristotelian form-matter dualities and what is dubbed “supervenient numerical identity”⁴.
2. All three puzzles are concerned with part-to-enduring-whole problems, in turn, exchange of parts, loss of a part, and having as a constitutive part the same matter as another entity.
3. In the light of the solutions put forward, these identity puzzles appear to be strong arguments against nominalism and reductive materialism. They point towards the view that the world contains real non-reducible enduring supervenient entities.