Philosophy 2 Week 3 Essay Quiz

● Here again is 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) Theon is a torso, that is, all of a bipedal (two-footed) animal except its left foot ● Another response to the puzzle is that one can accept the principle of mereological essentialism this is the principle that every part of a thing is essential to it thus, the loss of any part necessitates that the original thing is destroyed, ceases to be Dion loses a part, so he ceases to exist, so only Theon survives the amputation of the left foot The main virtue of this (far-fetched) principle is that it allows one to preserve the doctrine that no two things can be entirely spatially coincident, at least in light of the puzzle of Dion and Theon But the costs are significant, forcing us to reject our understanding of what familiar material objects are ● Another response is to deny that there are torsos if this is the case, there is no Theon to begin with and so no puzzle This does not sound so implausible to me And some philosophers, such as Peter van Inwagen, have denied that there are any undetached parts of things (this seems to go too far) Burke dismisses this response to the puzzle, because he maintains that even if one rejects that there are torsos, which might be dubious things, one can generate the puzzle using, say, a head (and no one denies that there are heads) I do not know why Burke say this, it seems incorrect to me Suppose Dion is a person and Theon is a head (Dion’s head) If Dion’s head is severed from his body, it’s clear that Dion ceases to be; it is not the case that Dion is now exactly collocated with Theon ● Another response is to invoke the doctrine of temporal parts According to this doctrine, things are spread out in time in the way that they are spread out in space So just as most things are not entirely located at a single point, most familiar things are not entirely located at a moment

A thing in its entirety has duration, it’s like a space-time worm, with just a part—a temporal slice—at each moment If this is so, one can say that Dion and Theon never are exactly collocated, they just have exactly overlapping—even identical—parts after the amputation (Dion is always bigger than Theon if he ever is) One of the costs of this response is that it seems to require a certain (problematic) view of the world in time ● Another response is to relativize identity to a time (as George Myro does) or to a sortal (as Peter Geach does) After the amputation there is just one thing there According to Myro, that thing is both Dion and Theon Dion and Theon were distinct yesterday, but they are now identical if this is correct, one must reject Leibniz’s Law, Theon has the property of having been a torso, but Dion does not According to Geach, that thing is both Dion and Theon things are not identical or distinct simpliciter, they are not just the same or different things are only the same K or distinct K (where K is some sortal, a term for a kind) so that thing that is there (after the amputation) is the same person as Dion, not the same person as Theon, the same torso as Theon it’s hard (if not impossible) to say exactly what that thing is after the amputation Part of the motivation for relativizing identity is that it enables one to solve a puzzle like this one involving Dion and Theon But if there is a better way of responding to the puzzle, there is little reason to reject so basic a notion as absolute identity