Sameness and Substance Renewed
Wiggins (David)
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Back Cover Blurb

  1. In this book, which thoroughly revises and greatly expands his classic work "Wiggins (David) - Sameness and Substance" (1980), David Wiggins retrieves and refurbishes in the light of twentieth-century logic and logical theory certain conceptions of identity, of substance and of persistence through change that philosophy inherits from its past.
  2. In this new version, he vindicates the absoluteness, necessity, determinateness and all or nothing character of identity against rival conceptions.
  3. He defends a form of essentialism that he calls individuative essentialism, and then a form of realism that he calls conceptualist realism, a position he seeks to place in relation to one surviving insight of idealism.
  4. In a final chapter, he advocates a human being based conception of the identity and individuation1 of persons, arguing that any satisfactory account of personal memory must enforce and follow through all the normative requirements that flow from its logically inalienable aspiration to furnish direct knowledge of the rememberer's own past.
  5. This important book will appeal to a wide range of readers in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and analytic philosophy.
  6. David Wiggins is Wykeham Professor of Logic Emeritus in the University of Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy, and Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His publications include "Wiggins (David) - Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value" and many journal articles.
Chapter Breakdown
  1. "Wiggins (David) - The Absoluteness of Sameness" - 21
    → 1. A central question about identity; and rival answers given by defenders of the absoluteness of identity and the relativity of identity - 21
    → 2. Leibniz's Law4 and the difficulties of relative identity5 - 24
    → 3. Five ways for it to be false that a =g b - 28
    → 4. Possible examples of type-(4) relativity - 34
    → 5. Some cases that might be alleged to be of type (5) - 35
    → 6. Discussion of type-(4) cases - 36
    → 7. Discussion of type-(5) cases and some attempted amendments of Leibniz's Law6 - 43
    → 8. A mathematical example supposedly of type (5) - 50
    → 9. Conclusion concerning R, the Relativity of Identity - 51
    → 10. Absoluteness and sortal7 dependence jointly affirmed and formalized - 53
  2. "Wiggins (David) - Outline of a Theory of Individuation" - 55
    → 1. Proposition D and the rationale of the ‘same what?’ question - 55
    → 2. The charge of circularity, or of emptiness - 58
    → 3. The identity of indiscernibles8 - 61
    → 4. Proposition D further explicated and amplified: and D(ii) as the proper development of D - 63
    → 5. Existence and sortal9 predications - 68
    → 6. Further D principles - 69
    → 7. Miscellaneous further principles; and a doubt about counting - 74
  3. "Wiggins (David) - Sortal Concepts: and the Characteristic Activity or Function or Purpose of their Compliants" - 77
    → 1. The sortal10 predicates of natural kinds11 - 77
    → 2. The other sortal12 predicates - 86
    → 3. Problems of artefact identity - 91
    → 4. Two approaches to the problem of artefact identity - 95
    → 5. Summary of conclusions to date: and a methodological remark - 102
    → 6. Transition to Chapters Four and Five - 105
  4. "Wiggins (David) - Individuative Essentialism" - 107
    → 1. Independence from the explicitly modal13 of the foregoing theory of individuation14 - 107
    → 2. Principles and maxims governing the derivation of a modest essentialism - 108
    → 3. The necessity of identity and the necessity of difference - 114
    → 4. Conceivability, theory and essence - 118
    → 5. Conceivability continued - 121
    → 6. Individuative essentialism and its consequences - 123
    → 7. That the idea of ‘haecceitas’ is as misbegotten as the word itself is unlovely - 125
    → 8. The essentialist ‘must’ and ‘can’ - 126
    → 9. Avoiding overspecificity, allowing vagueness - 128
    → 10. Other de re necessities, real or putative: a framework for further inquiry - 130
    → 11. The essences of artefacts and the matter of artefacts - 133
    → 12. One special kind of artefact: works of art and the essences of these - 136
  5. "Wiggins (David) - Conceptualism and Realism" - 139
    → 1. Anti-realist conceptualism and anti-conceptualist realism - 139
    → 2. Four clarifications - 142
    → 3. A conventionalist reconstruction of our modal15 convictions: a conceptualist anti-realist view of essence - 144
    → 4. A hypothesis concerning the sources of anti-essentialism - 147
    → 5. An exaggeration of conceptualism, deprecated and corrected in the light of certain truisms; and the reply to the anti-conceptualist realist begun - 148
    → 6. The perfect consonance of sober realism and sober conceptualism - 151
    → 7. The realist requirement restated, refurbished and satisfied - 153
    → 8. Concluding suggestions - 155
  6. "Wiggins (David) - Identity: Absolute, Determinate, and All Or Nothing, Like No Other Relation But Itself" - 157
    → 1. Three contrasted views of singling out an object - 157
    → 2. Back and forth between the object and the thought of the object - 159
    → 3. Some putative examples of indeterminate objects - 161
    → 4. If object a is the same as object b, then a is determinately the same as b - 162
    → 5. What, if anything, follows from such formal derivations? - 163
    → 6. Treatment of examples (a), (b), (c); of §3 - 167
    → 7. Sense and point; and sense as the work of the mind - 171
    → 8. On the level of reference, things cannot be simply conceived into being or postulated into existence — not even material things with matter putatively ready at hand - 173
    → 9. Once again (one last time) the things to which simple identity sentences make a reference to - 176
    → 10. More about the relation of identity - 183
    → 11. Might it ever be true to say that a was almost b, that a was almost numerically identical with b? 188
    → 12. Conclusion - 192
  7. "Wiggins (David) - Personal Identity" - 193
    • PART ONE
      → 1. An expeditious if precipitate answer to the question of personal identity - 193
      → 2. Doubts, and answers to doubts: subjects of consciousness - 194
      → 3. The Lockean conception; and Butler's criticisms of such conceptions - 197
      → 4. A neo-Lockean identity-condition - 200
      → 5. Butler's central insight - 203
      → 6. A neo-Lockean conception - 205
      → 7. Unfinished business - 208
      → 8. The theses to be argued in this chapter - 211
      → 9. Co-consciousness again, and quasi-memory16 - 212
      → 10. A second and third question about Parfit’s17 definition of ‘Q-remember’ - 214
      → 11. Digression: an alternative method of definition, revealing by its inadequacy the semantical point of the attribution of experiential memory - 217
      → 12. More about ‘dependent in the right way’ - 222
    • PART TWO
      → 13. As it now appears, the state of the whole argument to date - 225
      → 14. Participation in the growth of knowledge - 227
      → 15. The penultimate problem and a verdict upon it, all leading in due course to a reassessment of the original Shoemaker case - 231
      → 16. Brown-Brownson reconsidered - 232
      → 17. One last variant — and the philosophical moral of same. Finally, human persons as artefacts? – 236

    Select bibliography - 245
    Index of names of persons cited or mentioned - 251
    Index of contents (themes, theses, examples, etc.)
Book Comment


"Bakhurst (David) - Review of David Wiggins's 'Sameness and Substance Renewed'"

Source: Philosophy - 79, Jan2004, Issue 307, p133-141, 9p


Introduction
    This book is a new version of David Wiggins’s well-known Sameness and Substance (SS), originally published by Blackwell in 1980. Wiggins has painstakingly revised and updated his original text, introducing one new chapter and rewriting another. Since SS was itself an expansion and development of an earlier work, Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (Blackwell, 1967), Sameness and Substance Renewed (SSR) presents Wiggins’s latest statement of positions on which he has been working for almost four decades. No doubt some will dismiss SSR as the philosophical equivalent of a ‘digital re-mastering’ of a classic recording, supplemented by a couple of ‘bonus tracks’, and of interest to connoisseurs alone. But this would be a mistake. SSR offers a vibrant and engaging treatment of some of the deepest questions of metaphysics and epistemology. The new material, comprising almost half the text, is consistently insightful, just as the old is of enduring relevance. This is a book that deserves to be widely read and discussed.

Paper Comment


"Bakhurst (David) - Wiggins on Persons and Human Nature"

Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Sep., 2005), pp. 462-469


Author’s Introduction
  • No part of David Wiggins's 1980 book, "Wiggins (David) - Sameness and Substance" is more fascinating than its final chapter1 where Wiggins's distinctive anthropocentrism and naturalism finds dramatic expression in his account of persons as human animals. The discussion is absorbing because the special problems posed by personal identity represent a test case for any theory of individuation. But more than this, the concept of a person is a pivotal element in Wiggins's philosophy, linking the metaphysical and the moral dimensions of his thought. Such is the issue's importance to Wiggins that he returned to it in several subsequent essays to rework and refine his position2. This process continues with "Wiggins (David) - Sameness and Substance Renewed", for which Wiggins has entirely rewritten the original chapter on persons.
  • The core of the position that emerges in SS, and which remains constant through its refinement in later writings, is this. Although the terms "person" and "human being" differ in sense, the concepts person and human being assign the same underlying principle of individuation, so A cannot be the same person as B unless A is the same human being as B. This is not quite the claim that all and only human beings are persons. The point is rather that for the kind of creatures that we are, namely human beings, our humanity is essential to our personhood. It is possible that "person" might be properly applied to something that is not a human being, and that something non-human might have the psychological attributes that persons typically have. Wiggins doubts, however, that we can make as much sense of these possibilities as we think. Our stereotype or paradigm of a person is a human being, and this tacitly informs all our thinking about persons, including our speculations about those of a supposedly non-human variety.
  • In SS, Wiggins develops this account in dialogue with two opposing positions.
    1. The first is the Lockean view that continuity of consciousness, mediated by experiential memory, is the real core of personal identity. Wiggins has considerable sympathy for this view, maintaining against those who construe personal identity in terms of bodily continuity alone, that the Lockean is right to portray the integrity of our mental lives as crucial to our identity. What Wiggins challenges is the idea that we can represent continuity of consciousness as something other than an expression of the vital functions and faculties of a creature engaged, as we are, with the world and with other such creatures. It is not that personal identity consists in the continuity of either mind or body. What is at issue is the continued active existence of an embodied, minded being.
    2. The second opponent is a constructionist who holds that the marks of personhood are socially determined. On this view, what counts as a person is a matter of convention or (tacit) agreement. The essence of personhood is merely nominal, and open to transformation if different patterns of use for the term "person" can be established. Hard cases about identity and survival, of a kind concocted in philosophical thought experiments, show the limits of our existing concepts, though nothing dictates how we should respond to them. It is, broadly speaking, up to us what to make of the concept. Wiggins's case against such constructionism focuses on its moral and political ineptitude3. It leads, he maintains, to the triumph of a managerial consciousness that embraces facile utilitarian identifications of value and desire-satisfaction and delights in dubious projects of social engineering. A robust conception of human nature, in contrast, enables a deeper politics that can admit that the compass of human desire, and the depth of human potential, may transcend our present conceptions.
  • …

Paper Comment

For the full text, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File4.



In-Page Footnotes ("Bakhurst (David) - Wiggins on Persons and Human Nature")

Footnote 1: "Wiggins (David) - Personal Identity (S&S)".

Footnote 2: Footnote 3: "Wiggins (David) - Sameness and Substance", pp. 179-82.


"Lowe (E.J.) - Is Conceptualist Realism a Stable Position?"

Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Sep., 2005), pp. 456-461

Paper Comment


"Meixner (Uwe) - The Rationality of (A Form of) Relative Identity"

Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Sep., 2005), pp. 449-455

Paper Comment


"Wiggins (David) - Précis of 'Sameness and Substance Renewed'"

Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Sep., 2005), pp. 442-448

Paper Comment


"Wiggins (David) - Preface: Sameness and Substance Renewed"

Source: Wiggins - Sameness and Substance Renewed, 2001


Full Text
  1. When Sameness and Substance (Blackwell, 1980) went out of print, Cambridge University Press agreed to take over the book. They suggested that the Longer Notes be dropped and certain smaller matters be attended to in recognition of what has happened since 1979.. They urged that the chapter about personal identity be superseded. In the process of my discovering how just and sensible these proposals were, then forming the resolve to follow the substance theory through more single-mindedly, and to a greater distance, there came into being the version I have called Sameness and Substance Renewed.
  2. Whether Sameness and Substance Renewed is the same book as Sameness and Substance is not a question of importance — the matter of a joke that will fail nobody who wants to make it, or else of an exercise for the reader (not to be attempted before reading the new Chapter Six or without regard to the sort of ambiguities set out in Chapter One, §§6-7). The present text seeks to correct all the things in the 1980 version that I know to be plain wrong. Then, in the same dialect of mid twentieth-century English, it extends that version at some of the places where more was needed. Most conspicuously, there is a new chapter about identity, vagueness and supervenience1; and, as requested, the of chapter on personal identity is entirely replaced. Those who interest themselves closely in the annals of disputes about these subjects will have to retrieve the old pages 149-89 from the same dust-heap of history as harbours most of the theses and questions once explored in the Longer Notes of the 1980 version.
  3. In the text from 1980 that survived all these decisions, there has been rewriting and abbreviation. Neither of these processes could be carried far enough. But the reader may be assured that the present version does not set out to transcribe everything that still seems to me to be true from Sameness and Substance (1980) or from the book that Sameness and Substance itself consolidated. That earlier book was called Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity, was published in 19672 and ran to seventy-eight pages of text. By chance or good luck, the present preface is addressed from the same place as was the 1967 preface. But neither chance nor luck, nor yet an inflexible will to abandon absolutely everything save what is central, could have restored the same brevity or the same simplicity of purpose that was possible in 1967, given the wider range of well formed questions now wanting attention.
  4. This is not the book that I should have written if I had been starting afresh or I had been able to train a freer fancy or a more impartial attention upon the logical and philosophical literature of identity produced in the twenty-one years since Sameness and Substance was given to the publisher. But I have tried to update whatever has been allowed to remain or else to test it off the page against alternative options made newly visible. It has been a great help that Sabina Lovibond's and Stephen Williams's collection Identity, Truth and Value: Essays for David Wiggins (Blackwell, 19963), henceforth their (1996), recently obliged me to review everything I was committed to. Sameness and Substance Renewed follows through the implications of the commentary I offered in Identity, Truth and Value upon the essays presented there by Timothy Williamson, Harold Noonan and Paul Snowdon. Not only that. It follows through the reactions to which I was moved or provoked by the numerous other items that I happened upon in composing replies to these three scholars. For everything Williamson, Noonan and Snowdon did directly and indirectly to provoke these reactions I am extremely grateful In the case of some of the other demarches in the field, however, it has seemed that the best reaction is to take note but remain silent. Some will disappear without the ministrations of comment or criticism. Others will not disappear but will seem misguided to anyone I can convince of the correctness of the approach to identity that is exemplified in this book. Yet others of more recent provenance must wait their turn to be read until this book is given to the new publisher, who has waited long enough.
  5. Acknowledgements to Noonan and Snowdon apart, as to Williamson (who did me a further favour by accepting the publisher's invitation to review the whole draft), there are newer debts of gratitude, to William Child, Stephen Williams, Christopher Peacocke, Naci Mehmet and Ian Rumfitt, for instance, each of whom read some version of some chapter or section or extract. I am grateful to New College and the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford for substantial technical assistance and especially to Jo Cartmell. Without her the task could not have been completed. From earlier times, a variety of philosophical acknowledgements must be carried forward that are no less real for being old: first (from the monograph of 1967) there are special thanks to Professors E T. Geach, W A. Hodges and B. A. O. Williams. From 1980, there are acknowledgements to M. K. Davies, E. L. Hussey, D. W. Hamlyn, R. A. Wollheim, C. A. B. Peacocke, M. L. C. Nussbaum, D. E Cheesman, J. A. W. Kamp, N. Tennant, J. H. McDowell. Debts were incurred on a much larger scale in 1977-8 to Sir Peter Strawson and Jennifer Hornsby. In 1980 I made more general acknowledgements to various papers by Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke and Richard Cartwright, and to Leibniz's Philosophy of Logic and Language by Hide Ishiguro. In divers and different ways, each of these authors informed or strengthened the various convictions that I needed in order to shape the characteristic, however insufficiently qualified claims of Sameness and Substance concerning the mutual dependence of the ideas of substance, causality4, law, and de re necessity.
  6. In Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity, dark claims were entered about the relevance and importance for the theory of individuation5 of the philosophy of biology In Sameness and Substance it would have been good if there had been more about these matters. After the abandonment of Longer Notes, all that remains here are certain sketchy remarks in Chapters Two and Three. But I shall recall from the 1980 Preface the keen pleasure that I felt at that time on discovering how, in response to all the facts that confront the biological scientist, Professor J. Z. Young had arrived, in chapters Five and Six of his Introduction to the Study of Man (Oxford, 1971), at a conception of identity and persistence through time that is strikingly similar, where living things are concerned, to the neo-Aristotelian conception that I defend:
      The essence of a living thing is that it consists of atoms of the ordinary chemical elements we have listed, caught up into the living system and made part of it for a while. The living activity takes them up and organizes them in its characteristic way. The life of a man consists essentially in the activity he imposes upon that stuff... it is only by virtue of this activity that the shape and organization of the whole is maintained.
    Two other good things that have happened since 1967 are the recognition in the philosophical community at large of the persisting conceptual importance, all foolish revivalism apart, of Aristotle's biology and philosophy of life; and the development by Peter Simons (in Parts: A Study in Ontology, Oxford, 19876) of a new account of the part-whole relationship that is far less alien to the present inquiry than the works of classical extensional mereology that I criticize so relentlessly in Chapters One, Two and Three.
  7. In 1980 it seemed that there were two important things I had to say about identity and individuation7. One came down to this. Identity was an absolute relation, yet, despite this, identity was bare continuity. A fortiori, neither identity nor even the identity relation as restricted to material objects could be the same relation as continuity as such. Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (1967) had been a first engagement in the war against this idea, which was no less dispensable, I said, than it was incoherent. Hence came the thesis of Sortal8 Dependency labelled D in Sameness and Substance (1980). This said that behind every true identity claim there stands an identity covered by the concept of some particular kind of thing (in a wide range of empirical cases, a substance-kind). Once D was in place, the philosophical work that remained was to show how in all their strictness, the formal properties of the relation of identity can be sustained by our kind-based individuative practices.
  8. Among the further consequences derived from sortal9 dependency were a modset but specifically individuative (contrast referential) form of essentialism and the second of the special things I thought I had to say in 1980. This was the doubtfulness of the separation, supposedly obvious or truistic and still widely insisted upon, between ontological and conceptual questions. Here, even if some of the things rehearsed in the previous paragraph have come to be accepted as commonplace, I think I have made scarcely an impression on received ideas about the sharp division of questions ontology from questions of ideology (In Quine’s sense of "ideology". See From a Logical Point of View, Harvard, 1953, p. 13110.) As in the 1980 version, the case for this adjustment is expressed in Chapter Five and that which leads up to it. In Sameness and Substance Renewed, Chapter Five prepares the way for some fresh reflections, pursued further in Chapter Six, about identity, vagueness, determinacy and the singularity of the identity relation. It is here that I think the conceptualist insight I try to formulate in Chapters Five and Six shines a light onto certain familiar questions, questions already transformed by Timothy Williamson's sharp critique of received theories of vagueness. See his recent book, Vagueness (London, 199511). Before the insight that I call the conceptualist insight falls into the wrong hands, however, let me say immediately that it is all of a piece with the absolute and adamantine hardness of truth. (See Chapter Six, §6.) The same goes for the increasing emphasis placed upon the irreducibly practical aspect of our acts of individuation12. This may even amount to a third important thing that I think I have to say.
  9. Chapter Six makes a protest against the idea that, even if identity is strictly irreducible13, it must supervene14 on somehow upon other properties and relations of objects, and supervene15 in such a way that these will constitute logically sufficient grounding for a judgement of identity. By this protest, I position the theory of identity and individuation16 to see the making of identity judgments in an altogether other way. Let us see it as an extension of our practical capacity to single out things of a given kind and then, in the light of an understanding of the behaviour of things of that kind, to keep track of them. The fully fledged judgment of identity outgrows its primitive origin but, according to my account, it does not lose touch with the original enterprise that it extends.
  10. If I had seen all this clearly in 1980, if I had seen the opportunity it affords for fresh modes of philosophical exposition, I think I might have found a way to treat the questions of identity and individuation17 otherwise than in the technical-sounding language of principles of individuation18, persistence, identity, activity. To dispense altogether with all talk of such principles would have been a noble endeavour. But it would have required a completely new book, one that strained less after generality or that only achieved it by the extended demonstration and discussion of eminent instances. Instead, the thing I shall say here about principles of individuation19 and so on is simply this: given that any serious or ontologically committed use of language of this kind can only multiply the kind of problems that philosophy has already with entelechies, forms, potentialities, actualities, etc., and given that such use may threaten an explanatory regress (as Penelope Mackie has properly observed, see her op. cit. at note 2220 Chapter Four) all talk of such things needs to be understood as notional. What would it be to treat it so? Well here is a start. To see that the principle of individuation21 for a buzzard is not the same as the principle for a bat, to see that the principle of individuation22 for a teapot is not the same as that for a housefly – there is no more to this (and no less) than there is to seeing what a difference there is between these things from the practical point of view of singling them out, of keeping track of them and of chronicling what they do.
  11. Chapter Seven, the new chapter on person identity, focuses on human beinghood, and recants anything I have ever said against Bishop Butler's objection to Locke's account of personal identity. The chief aim is to treat personal identity for what it is, namely a special case with a special power to test any emerging answer to the general question of the identity an individuation23 of substances. The chapter reviews briefly the course of controversy on these matters since the nineteen sixties, when a thought experiment24 of Sydney Shoemaker's deflected me and many other philosophers towards the neo-Lockean conception of personal identity. My completed recantation, which perseveres in doubts Bernard Williams, Paul Snowdon and I have expressed over a long period, comprises considerations inter alia of epistemology and the cognitive activity of human beings. On this basis, I seek to show that there is no non-vacuous sense in which one can say "the ordinary further facts of human personality supervene25 upon the facts of mental and physical continuity26 and connectedness27". (Pace the philosophers who say that sort of thing, those mental and physical facts are already identity-involving.) I must add however, that despite the completion of this recantation of Lockean tendencies, I cling to my admiration of Locke's Essay II.27, not least (now) of his “forensic”28 conception. This last has usually been taken to support the Lockean over the human being conception of personal identity. In the light of the considerations of physiognomy that I try now to insist upon, I think that the chief contribution of the forensic29 conception is to make us (the persons that we are) see the difficulty of conceiving of a person (conceiving of one of us) otherwise than as a being with a human form. Rereading the old chapter in Sameness and Substance that the new Chapter Seven replaces, I find that anticipated and spelled out at great length a range of practical and moral apprehensions arising from the prospect of other quasi-functional or quasi-artefactual, conceptions of personhood gaining ground The fact that that the ensuing twenty years have intensified these apprehensions might be ground for intellectual satisfaction. (For no other.) But the intervening years equally suggest the need to condense the apprehensions themselves into one or two bare paragraphs. At this point of the argument, the thing that matters is the intimate connexion between such apprehensions, familiar as they will now be to almost every reader, and the range of rival conceptions, some of them artefactual, some of them (like mine) anti-artefactual of what kind of thing it is we are concerned to individuate when we ask what a human person is.
  12. Readers who wish to begin by seizing the main essentials of the theory of identity and individuation30 which leads into all these other things (or so I claim) should not labour too hard over the later sections of the Preamble, which is mainly methodological and terminological. Terminological explanations that are essential — and some of them are indeed essential — are given again or referred back to as and when they are needed in the body of the book. The chief purpose of the Preamble is to place all these explanations where they belong, namely in a single framework within which they will show themselves to be singly and collectively defensible. Those convinced of the wrongness of my substantive conclusions or who object to the method of reaching them ought, in due course, to take the precaution of reading the Preamble through to the end.
  13. Readers who are prepared to skip should read Chapter One, sections 1-5, and then advance immediately to Chapter One, sections 9 and 10, before reading Chapters Two and Three. A summary is given at Chapter Three, section 5, of this material; just a partial summary is given in §2 and §8 of Chapter Five, to recapitulate Chapters Four and Five.
  14. The chief aim of Chapters One, Two and Three of the book is to place questions of individuation31, identity and persistence through time on a firmer and broader basis of theory in such a way that the particular point that is at issue in particular problems of identity will be loca1ly determined. Once matters are put onto this basis, there can be secure standards (or so I claim) by which to judge in situ, on the basis of the right kinds of consideration, the relevance or irrelevance to the given case of empirical information that is collateral with the case. The resulting conception of individuation32 is principled, logically founded, yet irreducibly practical. It is universal in so far as it always appeals to ideas that transcend the particular case, but also dialectical. It is dialectical not only in respect of how it envisages any particular decision being reached but in respect of the individuative practices that it justifies. Room is left for these practices and the thing-kind conceptions that incorporate them to proceed in a given case by considerations that are highly specific to it (scarcely general at all). That will not prevent these considerations from being universal in import. For the distinctness of the general/specific and the universal/singular (or universal/particular) distinctions and the compatiblity of specificity with universality, I would refer to R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford, 196333). (See his p. 39.) Even at this late stage in the specialization of philosophy, light can still be cast on logic and metaphysics from ethics and the philosophy of law.
  15. The explanation of how the conception thus formed of identity and individuation34 coheres with the invincible strictness of the laws of identity is completed in Chapter Six, which resumes and extends some of the arguments of Chapters Four and Five. Finally, the last part of Chapter Seven (§13 onwards) offers certain general reflections about identity and individuation35 and follows them through. In these concluding reflections I see some culmination of the efforts of earlier chapters. I hope that this part can be read on its own without the preceding sections of Chapter Seven.
  16. The price of making the book skippable in this way is paid by the reader who reads it right through. I have tried however to keep to the barest minimum the amount of repetition that is entailed by the policy.
  17. The purpose of the Select bibliography is to include a selection (updated 1999) of certain major and minor classics of the theory of identity and individuation36 and to make reference to other works that the reader may find useful or on which this book most heavily defends. Only incidentally is it a bibliography of persona identity or of anything else besides the theory of identity and individuation37. Numerous other useful or fascinating items not included in this selection are referred to in the footnotes. I know that many books and articles left out of the Select bibliography are just as good as those I have included. Philosophers hate to contemplate such contingency, I know, but the sole aim has been to make this bibliography short enough for it to be useful, useful in its own right or usefully cognizant of the particular intellectual debts it happened the author incurred writing or rewriting this book. The author/date system is used for references to titles included in the Select bibliography.
  18. The chapter footnotes are part of the final defences of the theory, but they are meant to be theoretically dispensable to the basic understanding of the argument. (One regrettable departure from this policy remains, at footnote 2 of Chapter Three.) But here is no attempt to push into the text everything which points at something important. Most especially I have not attempted this where the matter in the note leads not back to the argument of the text but outward from it. An example of that is the brief discussion in footnote 14 (formerly 12) of Chapter One of some of the differences between a substance and an event. Another example is the equally old footnote 16 of Chapter Three (now numbered 17), concerning that which I regard as the chief falsehood in the classical or original form of mereology or the calculus of individuals.
  19. The Index is intended to secure the sense of key technical terms, printing in bold the page reference that best indicates what acceptations I have aimed, for the length of a book, to assign stably and definitely to certain technical terms used here.
    … December 1999, New College, Oxford



In-Page Footnotes ("Wiggins (David) - Preface: Sameness and Substance Renewed")

Footnote 2: See "Wiggins (David) - Identity & Spatio-temporal Continuity".

Footnote 3: See "Lovibond (Sabina) & Williams (S.G.) - Identity, Truth & Value: Essays for David Wiggins".

Footnote 6: See "Simons (Peter) - Parts: A Study in Ontology".

Footnote 10: See "Quine (W.V.) - From a Logical Point of View".

Footnote 11: See "Williamson (Timothy) - Vagueness".

Footnote 20: The work would seem to be "Mackie (Penelope) - Sortal Concepts and Essential Properties".

Footnote 33: See "Hare (R.M.) - Freedom and Reason".


"Wiggins (David) - Preamble, Chiefly Concerned With Matters Methodological and Terminological"

Source: Wiggins - Sameness and Substance Renewed, 2001


Chapter Breakdown
  1. Aims and purposes - 2
  2. Formal properties of identity - 4
  3. Notions - 5
  4. Philosophical terminology: a manifesto - 7
  5. Sortal1 predicates and sortal2 concepts: and concepts versus conceptions - 8
  6. Real and nominal - 11
  7. Necessary/contingent and a priori / a posteriori - 12
  8. Formal notations - 14
  9. The mode of combination involved in ‘is the same donkey as’ 15
  10. Questions of priority - 18


"Wiggins (David) - The Absoluteness of Sameness"

Source: Wiggins - Sameness and Substance Renewed, 2001, Chapter 1


Chapter Breakdown1
  1. A central question about identity; and rival answers given by defenders of the absoluteness of identity and the relativity of identity - 21
  2. Leibniz's Law2 and the difficulties of relative identity3 - 24
  3. Five ways for it to be false that a =g b - 28
  4. Possible examples of type-(4) relativity - 34
  5. Some cases that might be alleged to be of type (5) - 35
  6. Discussion of type-(4) cases - 36
  7. Discussion of type-(5) cases and some attempted amendments of Leibniz's Law4 - 43
  8. A mathematical example supposedly of type (5) - 50
  9. Conclusion concerning R, the Relativity of Identity - 51
  10. Absoluteness and sortal5 dependence jointly affirmed and formalized - 53



In-Page Footnotes ("Wiggins (David) - The Absoluteness of Sameness")

Footnote 1:


"Wiggins (David) - Outline of a Theory of Individuation"

Source: Wiggins - Sameness and Substance Renewed, 2001, Chapter 2


Chapter Breakdown1
  1. Propostion D and the rationale of the ‘same what?’ question - 55
  2. The charge of circularity, or of emptiness - 58
  3. The identity of indiscernibles2 - 61
  4. Proposition D further explicated and amplified: and D(ii) as the proper development of D - 63
  5. Existence and sortal3 predications - 68
  6. Further D principles - 69
  7. Miscellaneous further principles; and a doubt about counting - 74



In-Page Footnotes ("Wiggins (David) - Outline of a Theory of Individuation")

Footnote 1:


"Wiggins (David) - Sortal Concepts: and the Characteristic Activity or Function or Purpose of their Compliants"

Source: Wiggins - Sameness and Substance Renewed, 2001, Chapter 3


Chapter Breakdown1
  1. The sortal2 predicates of natural kinds3 - 77
  2. The other sortal4 predicates - 86
  3. Problems of artefact identity - 91
  4. Two approaches to the problem of artefact identity - 95
  5. Summary of conclusions to date: and a methodological remark - 102
  6. Transition to Chapters Four and Five – 105



In-Page Footnotes ("Wiggins (David) - Sortal Concepts: and the Characteristic Activity or Function or Purpose of their Compliants")

Footnote 1:


"Wiggins (David) - Individuative Essentialism"

Source: Wiggins - Sameness and Substance Renewed, 2001, Chapter 4


Chapter Breakdown1
  1. Independence from the explicitly modal2 of the foregoing theory of individuation3 - 107
  2. Principles and maxims governing the derivation of a modest essentialism - 108
  3. The necessity of identity and the necessity of difference - 114
  4. Conceivability, theory and essence - 118
  5. Conceivability continued - 121
  6. Individuative essentialism and its consequences - 123
  7. That the idea of ‘haecceitas’ is as misbegotten as the word itself is unlovely - 125
  8. The essentialist ‘must’ and ‘can’ - 126
  9. Avoiding overspecificity, allowing vagueness - 128
  10. Other de re necessities, real or putative: a framework for further inquiry - 130
  11. The essences of artefacts and the matter of artefacts - 133
  12. One special kind of artefact: works of art and the essences of these - 136



In-Page Footnotes ("Wiggins (David) - Individuative Essentialism")

Footnote 1:


"Wiggins (David) - Conceptualism and Realism"

Source: Wiggins - Sameness and Substance Renewed, 2001, Chapter 5


Chapter Breakdown1
  1. Anti-realist conceptualism and anti-conceptualist realism - 139
  2. Four clarifications - 142
  3. A conventionalist reconstruction of our modal2 convictions: a conceptualist anti-realist view of essence - 144
  4. A hypothesis concerning the sources of anti-essentialism - 147
  5. An exaggeration of conceptualism, deprecated and corrected in the light of certain truisms; and the reply to the anti-conceptualist realist begun - 148
  6. The perfect consonance of sober realism and sober conceptualism - 151
  7. The realist requirement restated, refurbished and satisfied - 153
  8. Concluding suggestions - 155



In-Page Footnotes ("Wiggins (David) - Conceptualism and Realism")

Footnote 1:


"Wiggins (David) - Identity: Absolute, Determinate, and All Or Nothing, Like No Other Relation But Itself"

Source: Wiggins - Sameness and Substance Renewed, 2001, Chapter 6


Chapter Breakdown
  1. Three contrasted views of singling out an object - 157
  2. Back and forth between the object and the thought of the object - 159
  3. Some putative examples of indeterminate objects - 161
  4. If object a is the same as object b, then a is determinately the same as b - 162
  5. What, if anything, follows from such formal derivations? - 163
  6. Treatment of examples (a), (b), (c); of §3 - 167
  7. Sense and point; and sense as the work of the mind - 171
  8. On the level of reference, things cannot be simply conceived into being or postulated into existence — not even material things with matter putatively ready at hand - 173
  9. Once again (one last time) the things to which simple identity sentences make a reference to - 176
  10. More about the relation of identity - 183
  11. Might it ever be true to say that a was almost b, that a was almost numerically identical with b? 188
  12. Conclusion - 192


"Wiggins (David) - Personal Identity"

Source: Wiggins - Sameness and Substance Renewed, 2001, Chapter 7


Chapter Breakdown1
  • PART ONE
    1. An expeditious if precipitate answer to the question of personal identity - 193
    2. Doubts, and answers to doubts: subjects of consciousness - 194
    3. The Lockean conception; and Butler's criticisms of such conceptions - 197
    4. A neo-Lockean identity-condition - 200
    5. Butler's central insight - 203
    6. A neo-Lockean conception - 205
    7. Unfinished business - 208
    8. The theses to be argued in this chapter - 211
    9. Co-consciousness again, and quasi-memory2 - 212
    10. A second and third question about Parfit’s3 definition of ‘Q-remember’ - 214
    11. Digression: an alternative method of definition, revealing by its inadequacy the semantical point of the attribution of experiential memory - 217
    12. More about ‘dependent in the right way’ – 222
  • PART TWO
    1. As it now appears, the state of the whole argument to date - 225
    2. Participation in the growth of knowledge - 227
    3. The penultimate problem and a verdict upon it, all leading in due course to a reassessment of the original Shoemaker case - 231
    4. Brown-Brownson reconsidered - 232
    5. One last variant — and the philosophical moral of same. Finally, human persons as artefacts? - 236



In-Page Footnotes ("Wiggins (David) - Personal Identity")

Footnote 1:

Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
  1. Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
  2. Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)


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