Christina Conroy

When considering persons, one must consider the criteria for reidentifying a person over time. In the context of the metaphysical picture implied by Everettian quantum mechanics—one that includes some type of branching structure to the world—problems of diachronic identity arise. The problem with which this chapter is concerned is a Ship of Theseus–type problem; it argues that an answer to the question “With whom will I be identical postbranching?” can be found in analogy with a solution proposed by Derek Parfit in his paper from 1971, “Personal Identity.” This chapter proposes that we use a notion of branch-relative identity instead of the traditional equivalence relation of identity to solve this problem.

It is often suggested that at least some entities posited in QM are non-individuals, in the sense that they are numerically distinct entities but there is no fact of the matter as to which entity is which. Such entities are often regarded as holistic, in the sense that they necessarily belong to some larger system (for instance, each member of a pair of entangled electrons necessarily belongs to that system). The metaphysics of holism has been developed in different ways, e.g., relational holism (Teller, Br. J. Philos. Sci. 37:71–81, 1986; Morganti, Philos. Sci. 76:1027–1038, 2009), priority monism (Schaffer, 2010a; Ismael and Schaffer, Synthese 197:4131–4160, 2020) and OSR (Ladyman and Ross, Every thing must go: Metaphysics naturalized. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007; Esfeld and Lam, Synthese 160:27–46, 2008; French, 2014).In this paper, we shall outline a metaphysical model of holism which has not yet been developed in detail, in terms of mutual essential dependence. Roughly speaking, two entities are mutually essentially dependent if the essence of each entity, i.e., what that entity is, involves the other entity. This form of dependence can hold between individuals or between non-individuals. It is thus an ideal way to understand the holism of non-individuals in QM.We shall argue that this model of holism applies to a number of topics in QM and particle physics. We shall also argue that this model provides a better account of quantum holism than the priority monism recently championed by Ismael & Schaffer.

In this paper, we use qualitative and quantitative research, along with reference to current philosophical literature to consider the question of whether the sport of free-soloing is inherently immoral given the unavoidable extreme risk taken by the climber and imposed upon others not directly participating in the sport. The first thing we look at is what kind of values climbers see in free-soloing and show, through interviews we conducted with soloers and through a review of the literature on the philosophy of extreme sports, that climbers derive what might be called ‘higher pleasures’ from free-soloing. We then argue that despite its inherent riskiness, free-soloers ought to be allowed the autonomy and freedom to choose to engage in the sport, provided they are doing so in a conscientious manner. To show that they are, we again appeal to interviews we conducted to demonstrate that soloers decide to attempt a free-solo in a thoughtful manner, as prescribed by philosophers who work on the morality...

In his “Space, supervenience and substantivalism”, Le Poidevin proposes a substantivalism in which space is discrete, implying that there are unmediated spatial relations between neighboring primitive points. This proposition is motivated by his concern that relationism suffers from an explanatory lacuna and that substantivalism gives rise to a vicious regress. Le Poidevin implicitly requires that the relationist be committed to the “only x and y ” principle regarding spatial relations. It is not obvious that the relationist is committed to this principle in such a context. An additional motivation for Le Poidevin's argument, that space should be considered to be discrete, is that he believes that substantivalists are committed to a vicious regress. I show that the regress is in fact not of the vicious variety. These two main arguments show that Le Poidevin's suggestion that we drop the density postulate for space is unnecessary.