Notes for 10/22/2026

  

10/22/2026

 

[Philosophy Club every Wednesday, 5-6 pm, in the Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences room 436 ("The Cave")

Bioethics Club Tuesdays from 4:30-5:30 in CAS 436.]

 

 

If a statue is crushed to dust, does the statue still exist?

 

Locke thinks our ideas of artifacts, or vegetables, or animals are different from the ideas of the matter they are made from.

 

 

Locke rejects the view (largely Thomistic) that the idea of unities have substantial forms.

 

This is because there is no basis in sense experience for such ideas.

 

 

Locke’s account of diachronic identity for plants is:

[S]omething is one plant if it has an organization of parts in one cohering body partaking of one common life, and it continues to be the same plant as long as it partakes of the same life, even if that life is passed along to new particles of matter vitally united to the living plant, in a similar continued organization suitable for that sort of plants.

 

Exactly the same account is offered for animals, and essentially that same for artifacts.

 

Same artifact/plant/animal = chain of overlapping stages where material parts are exchanged under a common “manner of organization” (“chain of stages” theory of identity)

 

 

There is some unclarity here regarding what “continued organization” or “continued life” means. It isn’t just shape. It seems to include, also, observable function (in living things, nutrition, growth, etc.).

 

 

 

Descartes argued for a form of dualism on which:

(A)     A person is not the same as their body.

(B)     A person is a thinking substance (soul/spirit/mind) that can exist independently of their body.

 

 

Locke accepts A but rejects B.

 

He rejects B because soul/spirit/mind/substantial form/mental substance are not given in experience. These all reduce to the abstract (and empty) idea of “whatever it is that makes a person the same over time and that can exist apart from the body.”

(It’s not just an abstract idea, but a hopelessly vague idea.)

 

Why does he accept A?

 

Two thought experiments:

-      Prince & cobbler (body switch)

-      Two-persons sharing one body

 

 

Both of these thought experiments show that the idea of a person is not the same as the idea of a human body (“the man”).

 

In his chain-of-stages account of biological/artifactual identity, the core is the idea of a “continued life/organization”.

 

 

Locke now gives an analogous account of personal identity:

Someone is one person if they are made up of a chain of psychological stages making up a “continued consciousness.”

 

 

[A]s far as any thinking being can repeat the idea of any past action with the same consciousness that he had of it at first, and with the same consciousness he has of his present actions, so far is he the same personal self.

 

The most natural reading of this is that Locke is talking about memory.

 

 

 

This account is often misunderstood. A famous objection from Thomas Reid illustrates the misunderstanding.

 

 

Boy > Officer > General

 

 

Why do we apply the word “identical” (or “same”) instead of “similar”?

 

The answer has to be found in what we experience.

 

 

 

 

What Reid’s objection gets wrong is the direct parallel of Locke’s theory of diachronic personal identity to his account of diachronic identity for artifacts and plants.

 

 

Sprout > Sapling > Tree

 

 

 

 

 

A harder case for Locke?

 

Student > Bride > Accident victim