Harold Noonan

Philosophers debate whether one-boxing or two-boxing is the rational act in a Newcomb situation. I shall argue that one-boxing is the only rational choice. This is so because there is no intelligible aim by reference to which you can justify the choice of two-boxing over one-boxing once you have come to think that you will two-box. The only aim by which the agent in the Newcomb situation can justify his two-boxing is the subjunctively described aim of ‘getting more than I would if I were to one-box’. But such a subjunctively described aim can justify an action only if it can be seen as generating, in conjunction with the agent’s beliefs, an indicatively describable aim which justifies the action. In the case of the Newcomb agent the aim of ’getting more than I would if I were to one-box’ cannot be seen in this way

According to the presentist the present time is the only one that there is. Nevertheless, things persist. Most presentists think that things persist by enduring. Employing E. J. Lowe’s notion of identity-dependence, Jonathan Tallant argues that presentism is incompatible with any notion of persistence, even endurance. This consequence of Lowe’s ideas, if soundly drawn, is important. The presentist who chooses to deny persistence outright is a desperate figure. However, though Lowe’s notion is a legitimate and worthwhile one, this application is faulty. The incompatibility of presentism and persistence is not part of Lowe’s heritage. A positive conclusion can be drawn. A form of persistence is compatible with presentism. It is one on which persistence is defined in tensed terms using an adverbial tense operator: x persists iff x exists and existed or will exist. Unsurprisingly, so understood persistence is endurance. The commonly held view is correct.

Can the world itself _be_ vague, so that rather than vagueness be a deficiency in our mode of describing the world, it is a necessary feature of any true description of it? Gareth Evans famously poses this question in his paper ‘Can There Be Vague Objects’ (Analysis 38(4):208, 1978 ). In his recent paper ‘Indeterminacy and Vagueness: Logic and Metaphysics’, Peter van Inwagen ( 2009 ) elaborates the account of vagueness and, in particular, in the case of sentences, consequent indeterminacy in truth value, to which this conception of ‘worldly’ vagueness is opposed, calling it the ‘sensible’ theory of indeterminacy and rejecting it. In what follows, I defend the sensible theory van Inwagen rejects. I first explain more fully what it involves and, as importantly, what it does not.

Personites are shorter lived, very person‐like things that extend across part but not the whole of a person's life. That there are such things is a consequence of the standard perdurance view championed by Lewis and Quine; it is also a consequence of liberal endurantist views which allow such things coinciding with persons during part of their lives, though not themselves parts of the persons. Johnston and Olson argue that the existence of personites has bizarre moral consequences and renders what are manifestly wholly uncontentious moral judgements contentious. It suffices to note that, e.g., they say that if there is a personite now coinciding with me that will no longer exist tomorrow, though I will, this renders morally problematic my planned visit to the dentist today, since the personite, unlike me, will suffer the pain today but not live long enough to experience any gain. The same reasoning renders morally problematic spending time learning a difficult language in anticipation of a trip abroad. And irritatingly, in accordance with this reasoning, the child who claims that making him do his homework ‘isn't fair’, turns out to be arguably right. Moreover, since not only persons and personites, if they exist, but also, for example, dogs and what we might call caninites, would seem to have a right to be counted in the moral calculus, it can also be argued that just as it is morally problematic to force a lazy child to do homework, it is morally problematic to put an obese dog on a strict diet. What underpins the reasoning here is the basic thought that no relation one sentient being has to another can deprive it of the right to be counted in the moral calculus. Hence, the relation a personite has to a person cannot do so. Given this basic thought the acknowledgement of the existence of personites is, Johnston argues, morally disastrous or at least dictates an extreme hedonism.

Strong pluralists hold that not even permanent material coincidence is enough for identity. Strong pluralism entails the possibility of purely material objects -- even if not coincident -- alike in all general respects, categorial and dispositional, relational and non-relational, past, present and future, at the microphysical level, but differing in some general modal, counterfactual or dispositional repscts at the macrophysical level. It is objectionable because it thus deprives us of the explanatory resources to explain why evident absurdities are absurd. A second objection is to the suggestion that cases involving artefacts can illustrate strong pluralism. This offends against the principle that gien a complex intrinsic microphysical property instantiated in some regiion, the number of material things possessing it in that region cannot depend on the existence and nature of intentional activity taking place outside it

What is the difference between the complex view of personal identity over time and the simple view? Traditionally, the defenders of the complex view are said to include Locke and Hume, defenders of the simple view to include Butler and Reid. In our own time it is standard to think of Chisholm and Swinburne as defenders of the simple view and Shoemaker, Parfit, Williams and Lewis as defenders of the complex view. But how exactly is the distinction to be characterized? One difference between the two camps is that defenders of the simple view emphasize the difference between diachronic personal identity and the identity of other objects; they insist that in the case of the other familiar types that figure in philosophical puzzle cases about identity – ships, statues, plants and so on – the correct view is the complex one. On the other hand, defenders of the complex view do not hold a simple view of other things; rather they think that the complex view is correct across the board. We therefore need an account of the distinction which allows us to speak generally of ‘the complex/simple view of the diachronic identity of things of sort S’ where ‘S’ is a sortal term. A respectable view about problems of identity in general is that there aren’t any: any genuine philosophical puzzles can be rephrased so that the language of identity drops out. In what follows, I offer an account of the simple/complex contrast which conforms to this Lewisean view. 1 We can begin by distinguishing two types of constraint on personhood. Type, or synchronic constraints, are capturable in the form: If x is a person, then if x exists at t, Fxt where ‘ F represents a term for a non-historical property, a property …

What am I? And what is my relationship to the thing I call ‘my body’? Thus each of us can pose for himself the philosophical problems of the nature of the self and the relationship between a person and his body. One answer to the question about the relationship between a person and the thing he calls ‘his body’ is that they are two things composed of the same matter at the same time (like a clay statue and the piece of clay which presently constitutes it). This is the ‘constitution view’. In this paper we give a novel overview of the literature on personal identity, the constitution view, and surrounding topics.

Eric Olson has argued, startlingly, that no coherent account can be giv- en of the distinction made in the personal identity literature between ‘complex views’ and ‘simple views’. ‘We tell our students,’ he writes, ‘that accounts of personal identity over time fall into [these] two broad categories’. But ‘it is impossible to characterize this distinction in any satisfactory way. The debate has been systematically misdescribed’. I argue, first, that, for all Olson has said, a recent account by Noonan provides the coherent characterization he claims impossible. If so we have not been wrong all along in the way he says in what we have been telling our students. I then give an account of the distinction between the reductionist and non-reductionist positions which makes it differ- ent from the complex/simple distinction. The aim is to make clear sense of the notion of a not simple but non-reductionist position — which seems an eminently reasonable possibility and something it may also be useful to tell our students about.

In his interesting article, Michael Burke (1996) offers a novel solution to the puzzle of Tibbles, the cat, a solution he says, which is based on Aristotelian essentialism. In what follows I argue that, despite its ingenuity, Burke’s solution can be seen to be too implausible to be accepted once we extend it to a variant of the puzzle Burke himself suggests. The conclusion must be that one of the other solutions to the puzzle must be correct. Or, perhaps, that there is no correct solution and that we should simply (to use a Wittgensteinian turn of phrase) ‘say what we like as long as we are clear about the facts.’

How can we acquire knowledge of metaphysical modality? How can someone come to know that he could have been elsewhere right now, or an accountant rather than a philosophy teacher, but could not have been a turnip? Jago proposes an account of a route to knowledge of the way things could have been and must be. He argues that we can move to knowledge of metaphysical modality from knowledge about essence. Curtis rejects Jago’s explanation. It cannot, he argues, explain our knowledge of de re necessity. We agree. But there is more to be said. To give an account of our knowledge of metaphysical necessity is part of the task Jago set himself. But another part is to give an account of the knowledge of the possibilities accorded to particular objects. And prior to both what is needed, and something Jago attempts to supply, is an account of how ordinary knowers can come to have knowledge of an individual’s essential properties. We argue that Jago’s accounts of both these additional matters are also unsatisfactory. This is important because the thought that our knowledge of metaphysical modality has its source in our knowledge of essence is currently an attractive one and Jago has set out very clearly what must be done to justify the thought. The flaws in his proposal thus indicate the work needed if the attractive thought is to be accepted.