Alan Sidelle

One obvious solution to the puzzles of apparently coincident objects is a sort of reductionism - the tree really just is the wood, the statue is just the clay, and nothing really ceases to exist in the purported non-identity showing cases. This paper starts with that approach and its underlying motivation, and argues that if one follows those motivations - specifically, the rejection of coincidence, and the belief that 'genuine' object-destroying changes must differ non-arbitrarily from accidental changes, that one can plausibly be pushed to an extreme nihilism, that denies the existence of any objects at all.

This paper defends the traditional view that the laws of nature are contingent, or, if some of them are necessary, this is due to analytic principles for the individuation of the law-governed properties. Fundamentally, I argue that the supposed explanatory purposes served by taking the laws to be necessary --showing how laws support counterfactuals, how properties are individuated, or how we have knowledge of properties--are in fact undermined by the continued possibility of the imagined scenarios--this time, described neutrally--which seemed to disprove the claim to necessity in the first place. I speculate that this will be true for any proposed necessary a posteriori truths, and is a basis for rejecting their supposed metaphysical significance.

Many philosophers believe that identity through time cannot depend on features extrinsic to the relata and relations between them. This goes with the view that one must deny identity in cases for which there is a ‘duplication case’-a case just like the first, but for an additional, ‘external’ element which provides an equal or better ‘candidate’ for identity with one of the relata. Such friends of intrinsicness cannot remedy the failure of continuity of function/form to be one-one by non-branching or closest competitor clauses. The obvious intrinsic approach-perhaps taken for granted-appeals to considerations of quantity of matter, requiring over 50% shared matter between identicals . But this rules out plausible cases of halving and doubling for which there are not duplication cases. After bringing out this problem, I ask what makes duplication cases possible, and use this to formulate an intrinsic condition which allows identity whenever there is continuity of function, but no threat to intrinsic ness via duplication cases

The phenomenon of rigid designation - in particular, de jure rigidity - is typically treated metaphysically. The picture is: reference is gained in a way that puts no constraints on what an object in other worlds, or counterfactual situations must be like, in order to be the referent of that term, other than 'being this thing'. This allows 'pure metaphysical' investigation into, and discovery of 'the nature' of the referent. It is argued that this presupposes a 'privileged' ontology, of a sort that is far from obvious. An alternative picture of rigidity is sketched, terms have associated criteria of identity and criteria of application for counterfactual situations. A term is rigid when these coincide. Aside from being a better account of rigidity, it also undermines the picture of rigid terms allowing us to 'metaphysically' investigate the nature of the referent: matters of identity and essence for the referent are settled by these semantic constraints (though it can be done in a way that allows are a posteriori necessities).