Continuants: Their Activity, Their Being, and Their Identity

This volume gathers twelve essays by David Wiggins in an area where his work has been particularly influential. Among the subjects treated are: persistence of a substance through change, the notion of a continuant, the logic of identity, the co-occupation of space by a continuant and its matter, the relation of person to human organism, the metaphysical idea of a person, the status of artefacts, the relation of the three-dimensional and four-dimensional conceptions of reality, and the nomological underpinning of sortal classification. From a much larger body of work the author has selected, edited or annotated, and variously shortened or extended eleven pieces. He has added an Introduction and one completely new essay, on the philosophy of biology and the role there of the idea of process. The collection begins with an essay postdating his Sameness and Substance Renewed (2001), which amends and upstages his earlier presentation of his sortalist conception of identity. In subsequent essays and the introduction Wiggins examines the contributions to these subjects made by Heraclitus, Aristotle, Leibniz, Roderick Chisholm, Hilary Putnam, Sydney Shoemaker, Michael Ayers, Saul Kripke, W. V. Quine, David Lewis, Fei Xu, and others.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1: Identity, Individuation and Substance 2: On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time 3: Substance 4: The Person as Object of Science, as Subject of Experience, and as Locus of Value 5: Sameness, Substance and the Human Animal 6: Heraclitus Conceptions of Flux, Fire and Material Persistence 7: The Concept of the Subject Contains the Concept of the Predicate 8: Putnam s Doctrine of Natural Kind Words and Frege s Doctrines of Sense, Reference, and Extension: Can They Coherea? 9: The De Re Must , Individuative Essentialism and the Necessity of Identity 10: Mereological Essentialism: Asymmetrical Essential Dependence and the Nature of Continuants 11: Sortal Concepts: A Reply To Xu 12: Activity, Process, Continuant, Substance, Organism

About the Author :
David Wiggins was born in London in 1933 and educated at St Paul's School and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he was chiefly devoted to Greek and Roman literature, and history and philosophy, both ancient and modern. He was a Civil Servant in the Colonial Office, 1957-9. A Proctor Visiting Fellow at Princeton in 1956-7, Wiggins went on to become a Lecturer and then Fellow in Philosophy at New College Oxford before moving to Bedford College, London where he worked as a professor from 1967-80. He then went on to become a Fellow at University College, London and professor at Birkbeck College before taking the position of Wykeham Professor of Logic, University of Oxford. Now in retirement, his chief preoccupations are metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of the practical. His previous publications include Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value (Oxford University Press) and Ethics: Twelve lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (Harvard University Press).

Review :
Continuants is a welcome collection of some of [David Wiggins's] most important essays. . . . Wiggins is perhaps the contemporary philosopher I most often wish had been read properly by those with whom I am conversing and arguing in philosophy. After four and a half decades of thought [Wiggins] is still searching for satisfactory answers to the questions that obsess him, and though there is no denying the difficulties his writings sometimes present the reader, we should join him in his search and be grateful that he is still continuing, after more than forty years, to contribute to discussion of these topics on which his past writings have been so influential.