Philosophy 2 Week 3 Essay Quiz

● Here’s the puzzle of Dion and Theon Yesterday there was Dion and Theon. Theon was a proper part of Dion, namely, all of Dion except his left foot. Today, Dion has his left foot amputated. So, if Dion and Theon both still exist, there are distinct things occupying the very same place at the same time and wholly composed of the same matter. Presuming this is impossible, the puzzle is to say which of the two, Dion and Theon, has ceased to exist (and why) This is a puzzle because it does not seem that either should have ceased to exist: Dion lost his foot. But it certainly seems that a human person can lose a foot, even a limb, and still exist as that very person Theon did not lose anything. In fact, Theon does not seem to have undergone any intrinsic change One might think, then, that both Dion and Theon survived and now there is just one thing in that place where Dion/Theon is But this is not plausible, given the indiscernibility of identicals, aka Lebiniz’s Law This is the principle that if a=b, then whatever feature a has, b also has (and vice versa) Dion has a property that Theon lacks, namely, Dion once had two feet (Theon never did) or Dion lost a foot (Theon did not) ● Chrysippus, the ancient philosopher who originally posed this puzzle, seems to have maintained that Theon has ceased to be This is a surprising conclusion, because Theon as undergone no intrinsic change an intrinsic change is contrasted with an extrinsic change (and the latter is not always obviously a sort of change at all) Consider: an intrinsic change is, roughly, a change in the features of a thing that do not depend on any other wholly distinct thing changing (or existing) e.g. a piece of clay gets squished, a wall gets painted an extrinsic change does depend on the existence of or change in some other thing e.g. a person becomes a parent or a spouse; a thing goes from being thought of to not being thought of there are relational changes like a thing being moved from one place to another; this seems like a genuine change, yet it seems extrinsic

The “change” that Theon undergoes does not seem to be the sort of change that could make a thing cease to be ● If all this seems familiar, it should: the problem of Dion and Theon is just the problem of Tibbles the cat and Tib Recall Wiggins’ solution to the problem: Tibbles, a cat, and Tib, a “cat-part”, both survive the loss of Tibbles’ tail; they are exactly collocated, but this is no problem because they are of distinct kinds Burke rejects this position. He is trying to preserve the claim that no two things can ever occupy the same place at the same time Why does he want to preserve this claim? He thinks it is “intuitive”, naturally plausible Is it? Some might object to Wiggins’ “two-collocated things” solution on the following grounds: it is implausible that there can be two intrinsically indistinguishable things Tibbles and Tib are exactly alike with respect to their intrinsic properties it might be true that Tibbles once had a tail – but it is not clear that there is a genuine property here, one that Tibbles has and Tib lacks ● Burke’s purpose in this paper is to present a novel solution to this ancient puzzle His solution involves a doctrine that he calls Aristotelian essentialism this is a doctrine that is attributed to Aristotle, an ancient philosopher it is the doctrine that some—but not all—of the features of a thing must be had by that thing, these are its essential features that very thing could not exist without having those essential features; it has them because of what it is the essential features are intrinsic to the thing, and so do not depend on how that thing is thought or spoken of