Why do some epistemic objects persist despite undergoing serious changes, while others go extinct in similar situations? Scientists have often been careless in deciding which epistemic objects to retain and which ones to eliminate; historians and philosophers of science have been on the whole much too unreflective in accepting the scientists’ decisions in this regard. Through a re-examination of the history of oxygen and phlogiston, I will illustrate the benefits to be gained from challenging and disturbing the commonly accepted (...) continuities and discontinuities in the lives of epistemic objects. I will also outline two key consequences of such re-thinking. First, a fresh view on the (dis)continuities in key epistemic objects is apt to lead to informative revisions in recognized periods and trends in the history of science. Second, recognizing sources of continuity leads to a sympathetic view on extinct objects, which in turn problematizes the common monistic tendency in science and philosophy; this epistemological reorientation allows room for more pluralism in scientific practice itself. (shrink)

This chapter examines questions having to do with whether and how things persist through change and how things do so If they do persist. Next, assuming that intrinsic change does take place, the chapter examines two principal views about how things persist through change of intrinsic properties, Substratism and Replacementism. It focuses on the specific but very important case of motion, or change of location. There are three major theories: Intrinsic Motion; Bertrand Russell's At/At (...) Theory, and an Aristotelian theory (Motion Intervalism). The chapter also considers the problem of the persistence of composite objects, including objects that can gain or lose parts. Replacementists might consider taking on board a metaphysically fundamental genidentity relation. Substratists have an explanation for the reflexivity, symmetry, and transitivity of genidentity, something that Classical Genidentity Theorists have to posit as a brute metaphysical necessity. This provides the Substatists with an advantage in terms of Ockham's Razor. (shrink)

How does an object persist through change? How can a book, for example, open in the morning and shut in the afternoon, persist through a change that involves the incompatible properties of being open and being shut? The goal of this reader is to inform and reframe the philosophical debate around persistence; it presents influential accounts of the problem that range from classic papers by W. V. O. Quine, David Lewis, and Judith Jarvis Thomson to (...) recent work by contemporary philosophers. The authors take on the question of persistence by examining three broad approaches: perdurantism, which holds that change over time is analogous to change over space; exdurantism, according to which identity over time is analogous to identity across possible worlds; and endurantism, which holds that ordinary objects persist by enduring. Each of these approaches appears to be coherent, but each also has its own metaphysical problems. Persistence includes papers that argue for perdurantism, exdurantism, or endurantism, as well as papers that explore some metaphysical difficulties challenging each account. In this way the collection allows readers to balance the trade-offs of each approach in terms of intuitiveness, theoretical attractiveness, and elegance.Contributors:Yuri Balashov, William Carter, Graeme Forbes, Sally Haslanger, Katherine Hawley, H. S. Hestevold, Mark Hinchliffe, Mark Johnston, Roxanne Marie Kurtz, David K. Lewis, Ned Markosian, D. H. Mellor, W. V. O. Quine, Theodore Sider, Richard Taylor, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Peter van Inwagen, Dean Zimmerman. (shrink)

How might we change ourselves without ending our existence? What could we become, if we had access to an advanced form of bioengineering that allowed us dramatically to alter our genome? Could we remain in existence after ceasing to be alive? What is it to be human? Might we still exist after changing ourselves into something that is not human? What is the significance of human extinction? Steven Luper addresses these questions and more in this thought-provoking study. He defends (...) an animalist account, which says that we are organisms, but claims that we are also material objects. His book goes to the heart of the most complex questions about what we are and what we might become. Using case studies from the life sciences as well as thought experiments, Luper develops a new way of thinking about the nature of life and death, and whether and how human extinction matters. (shrink)

This paper aims to motivate a new beginning in metaphysical thinking about persistence by drawing attention to the disappearance of change in current accounts of persistence. I defend the claim that the debate is stuck in a dilemma which results from neglecting the constructive role of change for persistence. Neither of the two main competing views, perdurantism and endurantism, captures the idea of persistence as an identity through time. I identify the fundamental ontological (...) reasons for this, namely the shared commitment to what I call ‘thing ontology’: an ontology that gives the ontological priority to static things. I conclude by briefly indicating how switching to a process ontological framework that takes process and change to be ontologically primary may allow for overcoming the dilemma of persistence. (shrink)

This article examines the development of empirical social research in Portugal over about a century and its relation to the early institutionalization of sociology at the tail end of that period. Relying on new empirical data, coupled with a critical reading of the main sources on the topic, it brings to light some epistemic invariants in a disparate body of research, acknowledging the initial persistence of Le Play-inspired as well as properly Le Playsian research methods. Furthermore, it identifies the (...) general continuation of a substantial concern with the (physical and then moral) condition of rural and industrial workers, leading to a disclosure of the political-economic and governmental roots of the social research in question. From a historical sociology perspective, the article explores the relation between state governmentalization and authoritarian rule, on the one hand, and the development of the social sciences, on the other. From a history of science perspective, it acknowledges the continuous use of the same research methods to carry out seemingly incommensurable social research programmes and the later pursuit of a properly sociological research programme that fell back on conflicting methodological and theoretical approaches. In broader terms, the article aims to put forward a historical sociology of theoretical approaches, research methods, and scientific concepts that will hopefully contribute to a clearer understanding of their respective fields of application. (shrink)

Processes of rapid and truncated agrarian change—driven through expanding urbanisation, infrastructure development, extractive industries, and commodity crops—are shaping the livelihood opportunities and aspirations of Indonesia’s rural youth. This study describes the everyday experiences of youth as they navigate the changing character of agriculture, aquaculture, and fishing livelihoods across gender, class, and generation. Drawing on qualitative field research conducted in the Maros District of South Sulawesi, we examine young people’s experiences of agrarian change in a landscape of entangled (...) rural, coastal and increasingly urbanised spaces. We find that young people aspire to secure, modern, and salary-based work, while continuing to seek and sustain intergenerational farming or aquaculture-based livelihoods. Youth take advantage of increased connectivity to diversify their incomes, yet their dependence on mobility also introduces new forms of gendered and class based precarity such as insecure working arrangements, disruption to education and violence (especially for young unskilled women and youth from financially insecure households). Our study highlights the persistent conditions of precarity that many young people encounter in both rural and urban settings, while challenging assumptions that youth are uninterested in rural futures. (shrink)

In this short discussion note, I cast doubt upon the common view that social groups persist throughout changes in their membership, by virtue of the maintenance of their structure and/or function. I offer two counterexamples, and consider two possible responses to a natural objection to them, neither of which support the view that it is a metaphysical truth that social groups persist through changes in their membership, or persist by virtue of the maintenance of their structure and/or function.

What makes an object the same persisting individual over time? Philosophers and psychologists have both grappled with this question, but from different perspectives—philosophers conceptually analyzing the criteria for object persistence, and psychologists exploring the mental mechanisms that lead us to experience the world in terms of persisting objects. It is striking that the same themes populate explorations of persistence in these two very different fields—e.g. the roles of spatiotemporal continuity, persistence through property change, and cohesion (...) violations. Such similarities may reflect an underlying connection, in that psychological mechanisms of object persistence (especially relevant parts of mid-level visual object processing) may serve to underlie the intuitions about persistence that fuel metaphysical theories. This would be a way for cognitive science to join these two disparate fields, helping to explain the possible origins and reliability of some metaphysical intuitions, and perhaps leading to philosophical progress. (shrink)

Questions of persistence and change are central to metaphysics. There is almost always a role for sortal or essential properties to play in theories of persistence. However, one might reasonably be suspicious of many of the claims about sortal properties and essential properties on which so many accounts of persistence conditions rest. The aim of this paper is to think through what persistence looks like if we don't help ourselves to these assumptions. In so (...) doing, we shall uncover a deep and difficult problem when it comes to identity facts and their relation to qualitative facts. Towards the end of the paper, I sketch a potential line of response that builds upon our seeming awareness of a genuinely persisting self. (shrink)

How can educators create space for students to practice making the worlds we are trying to collectively build? Inspired by genealogies that are grounded in and emerge from social movements, this paper uplifts the possibilities, tensions, and new questions that emerge when we take seriously the role of our classroom pedagogies. The authors offer a reflexive, methodological approach that pushes against the theory/practice divide and that stays with the importance of inhabiting theory through practice. They reflect on the role (...) their classroom pedagogies in enacting their commitments to justice, organizing their offerings around the following themes: (1) Enter, or how their learnings from previous teaching experiences shape praxis through the pauses, recalibrations, and persistent questions they provoke; (2) how they Open and create space in their classrooms through rituals and routines, and toward what ends; and finally, (3) how they aim to Build with their students within and beyond the bounds of the classroom. The authors share the guiding questions that prompted these reflections, as well as the echoes across their offerings, inviting readers to reflect on their own teaching practice in community. (shrink)

(Updated 5/23/24) This unpublished paper, which readers should feel free to cite, is posted primarily for the historical record. In recent work that has, deservedly, received some attention, Paul R. Daniels presents and defends a non-standard theory of persistence that he dubs transdurantism, according to which persisting objects are temporally extended simples. This is exactly what I do in work dating back to Spring 2004. (This work includes this version of this paper, as well as later version that was (...) presented to the University of Rochester's Philosophy Department in 2005.) While this might be a total coincidence, I doubt that it is, especially given that 'transdurantism' appears as a name for a theory of persistence associated with me in at least two places in the literature, one of which includes a citation of this paper. The paper begins with a discussion of what I call 'locative relations' (the relations borne by material objects to the regions of space and time they occupy), which draws relevant distinctions that others have failed to draw. The results of this discussion are then used in constructing spatial analogues for the three established theories of persistence--endurantism, perdurantism, and exdurantism--as well as for transdurantism. Next, these four views concerning persistence are explicitly formulated and a defense of their formulation is offered. Finally, transdurantism's advantages and disadvantages relative to the other theories are discussed. The main goal of the paper is to challenge the trichotomy between the established theories by arguing that transdurantism is also a viable view concerning persistence through time. [Note: Befitting its status as a historical document, with the exception of some light editing to fix typos that might impede understanding, no changes have been made to the paper.]. (shrink)

This thesis is about the conceptualization of persistence of physical, middle-sized objects within the theoretical framework of the revisionary ‘B-theory’ of time. According to the B-theory, time does not flow, but is an extended and inherently directed fourth dimension along which the history of the universe is ‘laid out’ once and for all. It is a widespread view among philosophers that if we accept the B-theory, the commonsensical ‘endurance theory’ of persistence will have to be rejected. The endurance (...) theory says that objects persist through time by being wholly present at distinct times as numerically the same entity. Instead of endurantism, it has been argued, we have to adopt either ‘perdurantism’ or the ‘stage theory’. Perdurantism is the theory that objects are four-dimensional ‘space-time worms’ persisting through time by having distinct temporal parts at distinct times. The stage theory says that objects are instantaneous temporal parts (stages) of space-time worms, persisting by having distinct temporal counterparts at distinct times. In the thesis, it is argued that no good arguments have been provided for the conclusion that we are obliged to drop the endurance theory by acceptance of the B-theory. This conclusion stands even if the endurance theory incorporates the claim that objects endure through intrinsic change. It is also shown that perdurantism and the stage theory come with unwelcome consequences. -/- Paper I demonstrates that the main arguments for the view that objects cannot endure in B-time intrinsically unchanged fail. Papers II and III do the same with respect to the traditional arguments against endurance through intrinsic change in B-time. Paper III also contains a detailed account of the semantics of the tenseless copula, which occurs frequently in the debate. The contention of Paper IV is that four-dimensional space-time worms, as traditionally understood, are not suited to take dispositional predicates. In Paper V, it is shown that the stage theory needs to introduce an overabundance of persistence-concepts, many of which will have to be simultaneously applicable to a single object (qua falling under a single sortal), in order for the theory to be consistent. The final article, Paper VI, investigates the sense in which persistence can, as is sometimes suggested, be a ‘conventional matter’. It also asks whether alleged cases of ‘conventional persistence’ create trouble for the endurance theory. It is argued that conventions can only enter at a trivial semantic level, and that the endurance theory is no more threatened by such conventions than are its rivals. (shrink)

How do groups of people persist through time? Groups can change their members, locations, and structure. In this paper, I present puzzles of persistence applied to social groups. I first argue that four-dimensional theories better explain the context sensitivity of how groups persist. I then exploit two unique features of the social to argue for the stage theory of group persistence in particular. First, fusion and fission cases actually happen to social groups, and so cannot be (...) marginalized as “pathological.” Second, it is implausible that groups spatially coincide pre-fission. This means that theories that depend on pre-fission spatial coincidence, such as some endurance theories and the worm theory, cannot explain fission cases. All things considered, the stage theory offers the best explanation of how groups persist. (shrink)

In this thesis I will defend a Reductionist criterion of personal identity, and show that that criterion supports certain commonsense claims about the morality and rationality of special concern and about the morality of the distribution of goods among persons. ;In Chapter 1 , I will introduce the problem of personal identity across time. We will see that a plausible theory of personal identity supports and motivates the commonsense claim that we should be specially concerned about our future selves and (...) intimates. ;In Chapter 2 , I will argue that we should reject a Non-Reductionist theory of personal identity. Non-Reductionism is unable to provide a coherent account of why persons persist through certain changes and not others, thereby committing us to a general skepticism about personal identity. Therefore, we should conclude that persons are not separately existing entities. ;In Chapter 3 , I present certain cases that suggest that we should reject our initial intuition that persons can swap bodies. I then consider whether we should accept the claim that it is not our identity that matters in our survival, and suggest that Reductionists can continue to claim that identity matters. ;In Chapter 4 , I defend the commonsense view of special concern. I claim that this commonsense view can be motivated and supported by the plausible Reductionist criteria discussed in Chapter 3. I show that the commonsense conception is more plausible than the Impersonalist view that tries to ground special concern in terms of impersonal values. ;In Chapter 5 , I show that Parfit's view of personal identity and what matters actually supports a moral theory in which the relationships in which persons stand to one another have intrinsic significance, rather than supporting the person-neutral theory of Utilitarianism. (shrink)

Van Belle traces the history of psychology from its roots in Greek philosophy and includes a description of the later influence of the Hebraic-Christian mindset on that history. Subsequently, he follows the journey of psychology through the Middle Ages and the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Next, he describes the birth and trajectory of psychology proper during the nineteenth century and closes with a description of a number of the more contemporary schools of psychological thought. The underlying thesis (...) of the text is that the history of psychology gives evidence of both continuity and discontinuity in interaction with one another. Thus, to do justice to the actual history of psychology one must take note of both persisting themata and changing paradigms. (shrink)

The personal identity relation is of great interest to philosophers, who often consider fictional scenarios to test what features seem to make persons persist through time. But often real examples of neuroscientific interest also provide important tests of personal identity. One such example is the case of Phineas Gage – or at least the story often told about Phineas Gage. Many cite Gage’s story as example of severed personal identity; Phineas underwent such a tremendous change that Gage “survived (...) as a different man.” I discuss a recent empirical finding about judgments about this hypothetical. It is not just the magnitude of the change that affects identity judgment; it is also the negative direction of the change. I present an experiment suggesting that direction of change also affects neuroethical judgments. I conclude we should consider carefully the way in which improvements and deteriorations affect attributions of personal identity. This is particularly important since a number of the most crucial neuroethical decisions involve varieties of cognitive enhancements or deteriorations. (shrink)

What does it mean for an object to persist through time? Consider the statement, ‘My car is filthy, I need to wash it.’ Consider the response, ‘How did it get that way?’ The answer is that dirt, dust and other particles have collected on the car’s surface thus making it filthy. Its properties have changed. At one point in the car’s career, none of that dirt and grime existed on its surface and the car was said to be clean. (...) The fact is that for a car to get dirty, the extension of time is necessary. The standard view of identity is that each thing is entirely itself at any given time. So how can an object remain identical with itself over time, if it changes its properties? In many ways I have different properties now than those I had last week. But if I am different, how then can I be the same? The objective of this article is to answer the question of what it means to say that we and other things persist through time. First I’ll lay out two popular philosophical views of persistence through time, then I will present possible problems with both views. After that, I will outline another possible answer that lies outside of these views. Finally, I will providemy own answer. (shrink)

In 2000, the Millennium Development Goals set out targets aimed at creating a safer, more prosperous, and more equitable world. If these goals were to be achieved, children’s lives would indeed be transformed. In this collection, achievements against these targets are identified, with each contributor examining the progress made in early years provision in Australia, China, England, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, and Sweden. They highlight the priorities and agendas of their respective governments, and focus on the trends and (...) issues which are particularly relevant to each situation, thereby revealing the social and educational inequalities that persist across countries. A common theme running through this volume concerns the political tensions that arise when governments and educators hold fundamentally different views about the nature and purpose of early years education and the needs of children and families. It is clear that although the past two decades have seen many changes in attitude towards the importance of the early years of life; politically, economically, and environmentally, much still remains to be done if the Millennium Development Goals for young children and their families are to be fully met. Despite this, this volume demonstrates that those who work in this area continue to experience a deep concern for the well-being of young children, which transcends cultures, frontiers, and political and sectarian divides. This book was originally published as a special issue of the _International Journal of Early Years Education. _. (shrink)

Objectives - To explore the wvay ethical principles develop during a medical education course for three groups of medical students - in their first year, at the beginning of their penultimate (fifth) year and towards the end of their final (sixth) year. Design - Survey questionnaire administered to medical students in their first, fifth and final (sixth) year. Setting - A large medical school in Queensland, Australia. Survey sample - Approximately half the students in each of three years (first, fifth (...) and sixth) provided data on a voluntary basis, a total of 385 students. Results - At the point of entry, minor differences were found between medical students and first year law and psychology students. More striking were differences between male and female medical students, suggesting early socialization had a substantial impact here. Conclusions - Results indicate that substantial changes in attitude have developed by the beginning of fifth year with little change thereafter. Gender difference persisted. Some difference in ethical attitudes were found when groups of different ethnic backgrounds were compared. The impact of a move to a graduate medical course, which gives high priority to ethics within a professional development domain, can now be evaluated. (shrink)

Climate change policy decisions are inescapably intertwined with future generations. Even if all carbon dioxide emissions were to be stopped today, most aspects of climate change would persist for hundreds of years, thus inevitably raising questions of intergenerational justice and sustainability. -/- The chapter begins with a short overview of discount rate debate in climate economics, followed by the observation that discounting implicitly makes the assumption that natural capital is always substitutable with man-made capital. The chapter explains why (...) non-substitutability matters if we are to take intergenerational justice seriously and invest aptly in mitigation. Non-substitutability simply implies that there are some forms of capital that cannot be substituted by another, and so consumption of one cannot be compensated with additional stocks of the other. The non-substitutability of critical natural capital can be defended without empirical data about preferences or the need to view the environment as a superior good, and the argument is presented through the language of keeping options open. -/- Those alive today make decisions about what natural capital to use and what to save for future. These choices are often represented as different points in a continuum of sustainability: weak sustainability is associated with a high degree of substitutability and therefore a lot of flexibility over what capital to consume, whereas strong sustainability is more stringent on substitutability. While it may be that in economical understanding weak and strong sustainability collapse into one another, philosophically the emphasis is slightly different. The chapter discusses how normative sustainability can be supported without ignoring opportunity costs and trade-offs. (shrink)

Many philosophers have found change puzzling. How can it be that something changes in its properties and yet remains the same thing? How can one and the same thing have these different properties? Questions of this sort, about the persistence of things through change, have been an ongoing feature of philosophical discussion since the beginning of the discipline. I think that there is something puzzling here, and that investigating change can be a fruitful way of (...) trying to understand a nest of connected issues concerning identity, time, tense, objects, properties, and instantiation. But not all agree. In some fairly recent papers, for instance, it has been argued that change is not problematic: there is nothing to be worried about. The phenomenon of change, it is suggested, is not one of particular philosophical interest, and we shouldn’t expect it to illuminate our wider discussion. As I have said, I think that change is problematic. I think it is initially mysterious how things can change. I believe working through the problem can tell us things about what the world is like, and thus that it is worthwhile doing so. In this paper I’ll defend the problem from the attempted dissolutions of it. In brief, my argument will be that what we are offered is not a real dissolution of the problem but rather an existing solution to the problem, namely adverbialism. This solution is not universally or even generally accepted. Pointing to a contested solution to a problem is doesn’t successfully dissolve that problem, so the problem of change is not successfully dissolved. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom holds that human bodies do not and cannot persist through beaming: scanning and destruction of the body, followed by transmission of the scan information and replication of the body in another location. I argue that given the minimal time travel assumption that information can be sent into the past, it is logically possible for (duplicates of) human bodies to exist in object loops. If so, then conventional wisdom is wrong, and bodies can persist through beaming. The (...) lesson generalizes to all composite material objects that can persist through intrinsic change. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a new solution to the problem of change: situationalism. According to this view, parts of reality fundamentally disagree about what is the case and reality as a whole is unsettled (i.e. metaphysically indeterminate). When something changes, parts of the world irreconcilably disagree about what properties it has. From this irreconcilable disagreement, indeterminacy arises. I develop this picture using situations, which are parts of possible worlds; this gives it the name situationalism. It allows a B-theory (...) endurance view on which there is genuine incompatibility when things change. There are costs to the view, which are explored, but it is a novel approach which offers a distinct explanation of what happens when things exist through change. (shrink)

Evaluators who are interested in developing or improving a program or policy frequently look to formative evaluation as a guiding framework.This book shows why those hoping to use evaluation to drive change in complex systems, rather than develop or improve one program, policy, or product, need to shift from the oversimplified idea of formative evaluation to a more specified continuous improvement model grounded in improvement science. In doing so, author Kristen L. Rohanna provides guidance to both evaluators and others, (...) such as K-12 educators or hospital administrators, who lead improvement initiatives in their organizations and seek to solve persistent problems of practice. The book includes an extended case study: a networked improvement community of five public middle and high schools. (shrink)

For a period of several years the philosopher of science Hasok Chang has promoted various inter-related views including pluralism, pragmatism, and an associated view of natural kinds. He has also argued for what he calls the persistence of everyday terms in the scientific view. Chang claims that terms like phlogiston were never truly abandoned but became transformed into different concepts that remain useful. On the other hand, Chang argues that some scientific terms such as acidity have suffered a form (...) of “rupture”, especially in the case of the modern Lewis definition of acids. Chang also complains that the degree of acidity of a Lewis acid cannot be measured using a pH meter and seems to regard this as a serious problem. The present paper examines some of these views, especially what Chang claims to be a rupture in the definition of acidity. It is suggested that there has been no such rupture but a genuine generalization, on moving from the Brønsted-Lowry theory to the Lewis theory of acidity. It will be shown how the quantification and measurement of Lewis acidity can easily be realized through the use of equilibrium theory and the use of stability constants. (shrink)

There sits my trusty coffee mug. Just like yesterday, only a bit grungier. So how does it persist through time and change? Is it wholly present at every moment during which it exists, as the friends of endurance think? Or is it a four-dimensional space-time worm that has different parts at different times, as the friends of perdurance think? Or is it instead a momentary object related in various to-be-spelled-out ways to other momentary objects existing at other times? (...) In How Things Persist, Katherine Hawley follows Theodore Sider in defending the third of these three views. (shrink)

Some disagreements seem to be persistent: they are, pretty much, immune to persuasive argumentation. If that is the case, how can they be overcome? Can argumentation help us? I propose that to overcome persistent disagreements through argumentation, we need a dynamic and pluralistic version of argumentation. Therefore, I propose that argumentation, more than a tool that uses persuasion to change the mind of the counterpart, is a toolbox that contains persuasion, deliberation, negotiation, and other dialogical strategies that can (...) be used to reach an agreement. (shrink)

How many championships have the Lakers won? Fourteen, if one counts those won in Minneapolis; nine, otherwise. Which is the correct answer? Is it even obvious that there is a correct answer? One is tempted to identify a team with its players. But teams, like ordinary objects, seem to survive gradual turnover of their parts. Suppose players from the Lakers are gradually replaced, one by one, over the years. We have the intuition that the team persists through this (...) class='Hi'>change, even after none of the original players remain. Suppose too that these original players wind up playing for the Celtics. Lakers fans face an awkward question: for whom should they root? On the one hand, they have the team currently playing in L.A.—a team that has continued gradually through the years, who wear the same uniforms, but now can’t make the playoffs. On the other hand, there are the beloved Lakers starting five (responsible for all those championships) now playing together in the hated Boston garden—a team which looks (despite wearing those hated Celtics jerseys) and plays just like the Lakers of old. What’s a loyal fan to do? (shrink)

In “Of Personal Identity”, Hume attempts to understand why we ordinarily believe in persistent selves. He proposes that this ontological commitment depends on illusions and fictions: the imagination tricks us into supposing that an unchanging core self remains static through the flux and change of experience. Recent work in cognitive science provides a good deal of support for Hume’s hypothesis that common beliefs about the self are founded on psychological biases rather than rational insight or evidence. We naturally (...) believe in personal persistence, according to this emerging research, because we are prone to categorize the world in terms of hidden essences and structure our lives in terms of whole life stories. (shrink)

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the social practice of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu¿s sociology of taste. For the first time, this book unites sociologists and other social scientists with artists and curators, art theorists and art educators, and art, design and cultural historians who engage with the practice of taste as it relates to encounters with art, cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life, in national and transnational contexts. The volume is divided into four (...) sections. The first section on ¿Taste and art¿, shows how art practice was drawn into the sphere of ¿good taste¿, contrasting this with a post-conceptualist critique that offers a challenge to the social functions of good taste through an encounter with art. The next section on ¿Taste making and the museum¿ examines the challenges and changing social, political and organisational dynamics propelling museums beyond the terms of a supposedly universal institution and language of taste. The third section of the book, ¿Taste after Bourdieu in Japan¿ offers a case study of the challenges to the cross-cultural transmission and local reproduction of ¿good taste¿, exemplified by the complex cultural context of Japan. The final section on ¿Taste, the home and everyday life¿ juxtaposes the analysis of the reproduction of inequality and alienation through taste, with arguments on how the legacy of ideas of ¿good taste¿ have extended the possibilities of experience and sharpened our consciousness of identity. As the first book to bring together arts practitioners and theorists with sociologists and other social scientists to examine the legacy and continuing validity of Pierre Bourdieu¿s sociology of taste, this publication engages with the opportunities and problems involved in understanding the social value and the cultural dispositions of taste ¿after Bourdieu¿. It does so at a moment when the practice of taste is being radically changed by the global expansion of cultural choices, and the emergence of deploying impersonal algorithms as solutions to cultural and creative decision-making. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Transformation:Power in Persistence and PerspectiveTyler BendrickWe've got another meth napper," my resident stated. With an introduction like that, it is hard not to be immediately labeled as a "difficult patient." Being the only Spanish-speaking person on the team, I, a third-year medical student, became the primary point of contact for this severely injured patient. He was an only-Spanish-speaking, 36-year-old male admitted [End Page 7] to our trauma (...) service after he was hit by a truck while riding his bicycle. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the 14 days I spent caring for this man would become one of the most pivotal learning experiences of my medical school career. It changed not only how I understand and approach "difficult patients" but expanded my knowledge of the complexities and challenges of the current healthcare system and how we, as physicians and healthcare providers, can deliver the best care to patients with low health literacy and limited resources.So, what is a "meth napper?" I questioned. "Well, meth is a super stimulant," my resident explained. "When people are frequent meth users, they get used to functioning normally with high levels of stimulants in their body, reducing the normal regulation of wakefulness. When the amphetamine is removed (such as upon admission to the hospital), the body is left to fend for itself, and thus patients oftentimes sleep for 23 hours a day for about 3 to 5 days while their body works to detox and normalize hormones."As predicted, my new friend, "Joe," was napping when I first went to see him. Thinking back, the word "napping" does not accurately describe his level of somnolence. He was virtually unarousable, and I took to a sternal rub to wake him up at 5 a.m. after his traumatic exploratory laparotomy the night before. Once aroused, he was furious. "Estoy bien. Tengo dolor y tengo hambre," he grunted at me. (I am fine, and I am in pain and hungry!). "Ok, Joe," I replied in Spanish, "I am just going to do a quick exam and you can go back to sleep. We will give you medications for your pain. You had a big surgery on your intestines, so you cannot eat or drink right now. If everything goes well in the next couple of days and you start walking around, we can advance your diet." He begrudgingly let me examine him, never opening his eyes, and I left and went about my day.We continued this routine for five days. I would periodically check on him and usually found him sleeping. When awake, he refused to work with physical therapists, get up and walk or go to the bathroom, shower, use his spirometer, or converse with the nursing staff. He seemed completely disinterested in recovery. About day three, we slowly advanced his diet to clear liquids so he could quench his thirst. Sometimes his wife was there, and she would ask for updates, to which I could only reply, "We have to wait until he is more awake or willing to work with us." I was getting frustrated, as it seemed that his noncompliance was becoming his barrier to discharge.But on day six, everything changed. I went to check on Joe, and he was wide awake, vomiting, and irate. He shouted that he was in incredible pain, and his incision was wet. He was also complaining that he had not eaten in five days, and was insisting that we were starving him. Again, I calmly explained (as I had multiple times a day for the past five days) that his major abdominal surgery prevented us from feeding him until his intestines healed. We were giving him fluids and nutrition through his IV lines, so he was not starving to death. I rushed to get my resident to examine his oozing wound, and after a CT scan and an x-ray, we discovered what we feared: His wound had opened down to the fascia, "dehiscence," as it is called. On top of this, he now had a bowel obstruction, causing his vomiting. His lack of mobility for the past five days had slowed his... (shrink)

Many philosophers have thought that our folk, or pre-reflective, view of persistence is one on which objects endure. This assumption not only plays a role in disputes about the nature of persistence itself, but is also put to use in several other areas of metaphysics, including debates about the nature of change and temporal passage. In this paper, we empirically test three broad claims. First, that most people (i.e. most non-philosophers) believe that, and it seems to them (...) as though, objects persist by enduring rather than perduring. Second, that most people have a view of change on which enduring but not perduring objects count as changing. Third, that one reason why the folk represent time as dynamical is because it seems to them, and they believe that, they endure through time. We found no evidence to support these claims. While there are certainly plenty of ‘folk’ endurantists in the population we tested, there are also plenty of ‘folk’ perdurantists. We did not find robust evidence that a majority of people believed that, or it seemed to them as though, objects endure rather than perdure. We conclude that many arguments in favour of endurantism that appeal to folk beliefs about, or experiences of, persisting objects and change rest on views about those beliefs and experiences that are empirically unsupported. There is no evidence to suggest that endurantism is the folk friendly view of persistence, and so we should stop treating it as such without argument. (shrink)

Our world is a world of change. Children are born and grow into adults. Material possessions rust and decay with age and ultimately perish. Yet scepticism about change is as old as philosophy itself. Heraclitus, for example, argued that nothing could survive the replacement of parts, so that it is impossible to step into the same river twice. Zeno argued that motion is paradoxical, so that nothing can alter its location. Parmenides and his followers went even further, arguing (...) that the very concept of qualitative change is inconsistent. Change in any respect is impossible, they argued, as change requires difference and nothing differs from itself. Few today would accept the Eleatic conclusion that change is impossible. But the topic of change continues to be a source of much debate, as it brings together various issues that are central to metaphysics, language, and logic – including identity, persistence, time, tense, and temporal logic. Author Recommends Wasserman, Ryan. 'The Problem of Change.' Philosophy Compass 1 (2006): 1–10. This article presents the problem of change and provides a brief survey of potential solutions. Haslanger, Sally. 'Persistence Through Time.' The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics . Eds. M. Loux and D. Zimmerman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. This article presents the problem of change and provides a detailed survey of potential solutions. Heller, Mark. 'Things Change.' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 695–704. This article presents, explains, and defends the temporal parts solution to the problem of change. Hinchliff, Mark. 'The Puzzle of Change.' Philosophical Perspectives 10 (1996): 119–36. This article presents, explains, and defends the presentist solution to the problem of change. Wasserman, Ryan. 'The Argument from Temporary Intrinsics.' Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (2003): 413–19. This article presents, explains, and defends the relationist solution to the problem of change. Sider, Theodore. Four-Dimensionalism . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. This book provides an introduction to various issues related to the problem of change, including the nature of time, tense, and persistence. Chapter 5 presents, explains, and defends the stage-view solution to the problem of change. Online Materials Change. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/change/ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on change, by Chris Mortensen. Time. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on time, by Ned Markosian. Temporal Parts. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/temporal-parts/ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on temporal parts, by Katherine Hawley. Material Constitution. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/material-constitution/ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on material constitution, by Ryan Wasserman. Persistence Bibliography. URL: http://tedsider.org/teaching/pp_bibliography.pdf A bibliography on change and related issues, by Theodore Sider. Sample Syllabus Books on Syllabus Rea, Michael. Material Constitution: A Reader . Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. Sider, Theodore. Four-Dimensionalism . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. van Inwagen, P. and Zimmerman, D. 2008. Metaphysics: The Big Questions . 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Week 1: Time and Tense Four-Dimensionalism , chapters 1 and 2. Markosian, Ned. 'A Defence of Presentism.' Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Volume 1. Ed. D. Zimmerman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004: 47–82. In van Inwagen, P. and Zimmerman, D. Metaphysics: The Big Questions. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008: 116-123. In van Inwagen, P. and Zimmerman, D. Metaphysics: The Big Questions. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008: 124-129. Week 2: Time and Persistence Four-Dimensionalism , chapter 3. McGrath, Matthew. 'Temporal Parts.' Philosophy Compass 2 (2007): 730–48. In van Inwagen, P. and Zimmerman, D. Metaphysics: The Big Questions. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008: 265-267. Hawthorne, J, Scala, M., and Wasserman, R. 'Recombination, Humean Supervenience, and Causal Constraints: An Argument for Temporal Parts?' Oxford Studies in Metaphysics , Volume 1. Ed. D. Zimmerman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004: 301-318. Week 3: Change and Presentism In van Inwagen, P. and Zimmerman, D. Metaphysics: The Big Questions. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008: 141-149. In van Inwagen, P. and Zimmerman, D. Metaphysics: The Big Questions. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008: 267-269. In van Inwagen, P. and Zimmerman, D. Metaphysics: The Big Questions. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008: 269-281. Week 4: Change and Temporal Parts Four-Dimensionalism , pp. 92–8. Heller, Mark. 'Things Change.' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 695–704. Lombard, Lawrence. 'The Doctrine of Temporal Parts and the "No Change" Objection.' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1994): 365–72. Week 5: Change, Relationism, and Adverbialism Hawley, Katherine. 'Why Temporary Properties are not Relations between Physical Objects and Times.' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 98 (1998): 211–16. Wasserman, Ryan. 'The Argument from Temporary Intrinsics.' Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (2003): 413–19. Lewis, David. 'Tensing the Copula.' Mind 111 (2002): 1–13. Caplan, Ben. 'Why so Tense about the Copula?' Mind 114 (2007): 703–8. Week 6: Change and Tropes Ehring, Douglas. 'Lewis, Temporary Intrinsics and Momentary Tropes.' Analysis 57 (1997): 254–8. MacBride, Fraser. 'Four New Ways to Change Your Shape.' Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (2001): 81–9. Simons, Peter. 'On Being Spread Out in Time: Temporal Parts and the Problem of Change.' Existence and Explanation . Eds. W. Spohn, B.C. van Fraassen, and B. Skyrms. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991: 131-147. Weeks 7 and 8: Special Topic – Material Change Four-Dimensionalism , chapter 5. Selections from Material Constitution: A Reader. Week 9: Special Topic – Change of Position In van Inwagen, P. and Zimmerman, D. Metaphysics: The Big Questions. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008: 186-195. In van Inwagen, P. and Zimmerman, D. Metaphysics: The Big Questions. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008: 195-215. Week 10: Special topic – Changing the Past In van Inwagen, P. and Zimmerman, D. Metaphysics: The Big Questions. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008: 224-235. van Iwagen, Peter. 'Changing the Past.' Oxford Studies in Metaphysics , Volume 5 . Ed. D. Zimmerman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009: 1-22. Hudson, H. and Wasserman, R. 'Van Inwagen on Time Travel and Changing the Past.' Oxford Studies in Metaphysics , Volume 5. Ed. D. Zimmerman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009: 41-49. (shrink)

Reconciliation is a biblical concept, wherein God reconciled himself with humanity through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The concept of reconciliation remains complicated in nature, and for the church to be an agent of reconciliation, prescriptive elements such as confession, repentance, forgiveness, restoration, restitution, mercy, truth, justice, peace and reconciliation will be discussed. The elements needed for the church to be an agent of change are action-driven and include a vision for change, the acceptance of (...) responsibility, the acceptance of failure, repentance, confession, forgiveness, action towards change justice, peace and mercy, and reconciliation. The aim of this article is to describe a possible process for reconciliation through change agency by using the biblical perspective of the concept as a foundation. The research will then focus on different perspectives of change and the church’s role as a change agent to bring about positive change in the transformation of existing and persistent forms of injustice that are problematic in society. Many theories of change exist; I will briefly refer to some theories of change and will then move on to sketching the elements that are necessary for the church to fulfil its calling as a change agent towards reconciliation as a core biblical principle. (shrink)

Law and economics scholarship suggests that, in appropriate cases, the law can improve people’s behavior by changing their preferences. For example, the law can curb discriminatory hiring practices by providing employers with information that might change their discriminatory preference. Supposedly, if employers no longer prefer one class of employees to another, they will simply stop discriminating, with no need for further legal intervention. The current Article aims to add some depth to this familiar analysis by introducing the insights of (...) behavioral ethics into the law and economics literature on preference change. Behavioral ethics research shows that wrongdoing often originates from semi-deliberative or non-deliberative cognitive processes. These findings suggest that the process of preference change through the use of the law is markedly more complicated and nuanced than previously appreciated. For instance, even if an employer’s explicit discriminatory stance is changed, and the employer no longer consciously prefers one class of employees over another, discriminatory behavior might persist if it originates from semi-conscious, habitual, or non-deliberative decision-making mechanisms. Therefore, actual change in behavior might necessitate a close engagement with people’s level of moral awareness. We discuss the institutional and normative implications of these insights and evaluate their significance for the attempt to improve preferences through the different functions of the legal system. (shrink)

ArgumentFranco's fascist regime in Spain (1939-1975) offers the possibility of exploring the complex relationship between media communication practices and the processes of production, circulation, and management of knowledge. The regime persistently used film, and later on television, as indoctrination and disciplining devices. These media thus served to shape the regime's representation, which largely relied on the generation of positive attitudes of adherence to the rulers through people's submission and obedience to experts. This article examines the changing nature of modernization (...) discourses and practices, as a fundamental element of the regime's propaganda strategies, and as portrayed in documentaries produced under its rule. The rhetoric of modernization involved an explicit deficit model of knowledge management, which aimed at legitimating the regime's deeds and policies in its first decades, as we shall see regarding colonial-medical documentaries produced for the official newsreel in the 1940s. However, the focus of such rhetoric, despite its enduring political aims, had to somehow open up as the relationship between experts and non-experts changed, both in epistemological and practical terms, such as in wildlife documentary films produced for television in the 1970s, the regime's last decade. (shrink)

The notion and consequences of the Crusades are still influencing the modern Christian pattern of thinking. These 'holy wars', fought by members of the Roman Catholic Church, mostly against infidels, including the Muslims of the time, lasted for several centuries and had varied levels of success. These wars were both lauded and criticised and currently these two opposite perceptions still persist. After the background to the historical setting of the Crusades, this article provides an overview of the changing viewpoints on (...) this movement by describing the perspectives of the most prominent authors who aired their views on the Crusades between the 16th century and the first part of the 21st century, finding that the negative perception runs like a thread through the last five centuries. (shrink)

Metaphysical theories of change incorporate substantive commitments to theories of persistence. The two most prominent classes of such theories are endurantism and perdurantism. Defenders of endurancestyle accounts of change, such as Klein, Hinchliff, and Oderberg, do so through appeal to a priori intuitions about change. We argue that this methodology is understandable but mistaken—an adequate metaphysics of change must accommodate all experiences of change, not merely intuitions about a limited variety of cases. Once (...) we examine additional experiences of change, particularly those in (special) relativistic circumstances, it becomes clear that only a perdurance account of change is adequate. (shrink)

The term āśraya is used in manifold ways in the Abhidharmakośa and its bhāṣya. This comes from the fact that its basic meaning, indicating anything on which something else depends or rests, is quite generic. Despite the plasticity of its usage, we can find some recurring and distinct technical applications of the term in the AK, which I explore in my paper. First, I look at its usage of characterising a member of various asymmetric dependence relationships on which the arising (...) and sometimes also the persistence of the other relatum depends. Through examining the nature of various āśraya-āśrita dependence relations the AK discusses, I show that āśraya stands for an entity that determines the fundamental nature of the thing it supports. In the second half of the paper, I move on to those occurrences of the term where āśraya has a specific referent. While āśraya can refer to the six sense faculties individually, it can also stand for them collectively pointing towards its widespread meaning as ‘psychophysical basis’. In this context, the focus often shifts either to the material or the mental elements that make up a sentient being. I will dedicate special attention to the discussion of the transformation of the basis, where, on my reading, it is more natural to interpret āśraya as referring primarily to the mind, with its bodily connotations being marginal. (shrink)

Neglect of the moral promise of disorientation is a persistent gap in even the most sophisticated philosophies of embodiment. In this article, I begin to correct this neglect by expanding our sense of the range and nature of disoriented experience and proposing new visions of disorientation as benefiting moral agency. Disorientations are experienced through complex interactions of corporeal, affective, and cognitive processes, and are characterized by feelings of shock, surprise, unease, and discomfort; felt disorientations almost always make us unsure (...) of how to go on. I argue that experiences of disorientation can strengthen the moral agency of individuals. I begin by clarifying experiences of felt ease and orientation. I then characterize disoriented embodiment by investigating select experiences that often involve or accompany disorientation, focusing throughout on how disorientation prompts changes in motivation and action. I conclude by charting how disoriented embodiments can help individuals become better moral agents overall, in part by challenging norms that restrict embodiment and undermining dualistic conceptions of the self. (shrink)

My 2019 article ‘From Planning to Prototypes: New Ways of Seeing Like a State’ (P2P) drew attention to some shortcomings of the kinds of critical, reformist impulses fostered in law and development work. I sought to show that persistent preoccupations with the destructive hubris of ‘top-down’ planning—especially state planning—bypassed the tendency for great power to be deployed in other stylistic modes: through the release and responsive tweaking of prototypes, for instance. This article engages with later developments—at one of P2P’s (...) main field sites and scholarly literature in dialogue with P2P—to build upon the analysis therein. It elaborates on the kinds of power animated through prototyping, showing how prototyping is often combined with other governance styles and what it makes of the inputs on which law has typically been said to draw and of law’s claims to autonomy. It complicates the provenance of this style by reference to mid-to-late-twentieth century UN sanctions regimes, highlighting that governance prototyping is as much state-made as business-led and not restricted to the development field. With particular attention to the strangeness of the human user presupposed by prototyping, this article also aims to identify some modes of critical engagement to which this governance style might be answerable. (shrink)

In this book, which thoroughly revises and greatly expands his classic work Sameness and Substance, 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. In this new version, he vindicates the absoluteness, necessity, determinateness and all or nothing character of identity against rival conceptions. He defends a form of essentialism that he calls individuative essentialism, and (...) then a form of realism that he calls conceptualist realism. In a final chapter he advocates a human being-based conception of the identity and individuation of persons, arguing that any satisfactory account of personal memory must make reference to the life of the rememberer himself. This important book will appeal to a wide range of readers in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This study advances understanding of how a normative feminine beauty ideal is maintained through cultural products such as fairy tales. Using Brothers Grimm's fairy tales, the authors explore the extent and ways in which “feminine beauty” is highlighted. Next, they compare those tales that have survived with those that have not to determine whether tales that have been popularized place more emphasis on women's beauty. The findings suggest that feminine beauty is a dominant theme and that tales with heavy (...) emphases on feminine beauty are much more likely to have survived. These findings are interpreted in light of changes in women's social status over the past 150 years and the increased importance of establishing forms of normative social control to maintain a gender system. (shrink)

This study examines the Italian Twitter landscape during the 2015 Syrian and 2022 Ukrainian refugee crises, with a focus on the evolution of anti-refugee discourse. Through the analysis of 400,000 tweets, we sought to identify attitudinal communities, track changes in user positions, and evaluate the trending potential of the communities. Our findings indicate a shift in opinion leaders within the anti-refugee community from 2015, alongside a persistent ability to influence public discourse. Additionally, while the pro-Ukrainian refugee community has grown, (...) incorporating previously neutral users, it remains loosely connected. Finally, the shifts in attitudes of Italian populist leaders regarding Syrian and Ukrainian refugees are interpreted in light of the changes in user attitudes as observed in the communication networks. This research highlights the importance of computational communication methods for investigating fringe groups absent from mainstream discourse, and underscores the necessity of content moderation and proactive digital activism to counter anti-refugee sentiment online. (shrink)

The paper pursues the thread of nothing through the work of Samuel Beckett. Beckett started off, in one of his first texts, "Whoroscope", by taking a shot at Descartes and his cogito, but one could read Beckett’s subsequent work as his own elaboration of cogito: the gradual total reduction of all redundancy, the reduction of language and the reduction of the body, his "heroes" becoming reduced to the pure point of enunciation, constantly on the verge of disappearance, but nevertheless (...) persisting. The nothingness towards which this process seemingly drives finally emerges as a loop of the "unnullable least". Hence the double meaning of the title: in Beckett’s universe nothing ever changes, but at the same time it appears that nothing has changed in the process of reduction, so that his work can be read as the strongest antidote to nihilism. (shrink)

Christianity changed the world for the better through the development of education, charity organisations, art, music, law and medical care among others. However, not all changes initiated by Christianity were positive. The Christian religion was also responsible for division, death, destruction and war. Focusing on the positive changes, nearly 500 years after the reformation though, it seems as if Christianity has lost its renewing and transformative powers. It seems as if society, politics and the economy are pressurising Christianity to (...) conform to the world and not the other way round. Therefore, the research focuses on the question whether Christians can bring about positive change and transformation to the current problems in society. What can Christians do to provide a religious response to current persistent societal problems? Change agents – people who drive positive change – are capable and competent, make use of networks, are visible and contactable and are often also outsiders in the communities they serve. Examples of the work done by change agents – Christians within their local communities – through small-scale community projects are showcased here to suggest possible ways forward for dealing with persistent problems from a Christian point of view. (shrink)

Why do certain places and not others symbolically capture the past and freeze time? Likewise, why does the process of memory, as a fluid and changing activity, seem to prevent its own solidification? Memory and Representation in Contemporary Europe reflects not only on the persistence of the past as a theme linked to modernity, media and time, but also discusses the politics of memory within a changing Europe. Drawing on the theoretical work of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin and Zygmunt (...) Bauman, Siobhan Kattago uses examples from both Germany and Estonia in order to address the multiple layers of Europe's totalitarian past. Through reflecting on the legacy of totalitarianism and the revolutions of 1989, it becomes clear that the issue is less of whether one should remember, but rather how to internalize the various lessons of the past for the future of Europe. Memory and Representation in Contemporary Europe thus offers the reader occasions upon which to take stock of different but overlapping contours of past and present in contemporary Europe. (shrink)

Human persons exist longer than a single moment in time; they persist through time. However, so far it has not been possible to make this natural and widespread assumption metaphysically comprehensible. The philosophical debate on personal identity is rather stuck in a dilemma: reductionist theories explain personal identity away, while non-reductionist theories fail to give any informative account at all. This chapter argues that this dilemma emerges from an underlying commitment, shared by both sides of in the debate, to (...) an ontology which that gives the priority to static unchanging things. The claim defended here is that the dilemma of personal identity can be overcome if we acknowledge the biological nature of human persons and switch to a process- ontological framework that takes process and change to be ontologically primary. Human persons are biological higher-order processes, rather than things, and their identity conditions can be scientifically investigated. (shrink)

Space, Time, Matter, and Form collects ten of David Bostock's essays on themes from Aristotle's Physics, four of them published here for the first time. The first five papers look at issues raised in the first two books of the Physics, centred on notions of matter and form, and the idea of substance as what persists through change. They also range over other of Aristotle's scientific works, such as his biology and psychology and the account of change (...) in his De Generatione et Corruptione. The volume's remaining essays examine themes in later books of the Physics, including infinity, place, time, and continuity. Bostock argues that Aristotle's views on these topics are of real interest in their own right, independent of his notions of substance, form, and matter; they also raise some pressing problems of interpretation, which these essays seek to resolve. (shrink)